Over the next few days, the swelling subsided and the pain vanished, but Butler's newly acquired accent did not. Though it has softened over time, she's never again spoken like a native Oregonian from Madras. To most people, she sounds British.
It took months to find an explanation: foreign accent syndrome, a disorder so rare that only about 60 cases have been documented worldwide since the early 1900s. She's the first known case in Oregon, said Dr. Ted Lowenkopf, medical director of the statewide Providence Stroke Center. The condition changed Butler's life, forcing her to answer endless questions about her accent. Most people are incredulous at first. A few insist she's faking it.
Foreign accent syndrome is usually caused by a stroke, though it also has been associated with multiple sclerosis, head injuries and migraines. It's unclear what caused her speech pattern to change. Dental surgeries do not pose a stroke risk and the drug that Butler says the dentist used to sedate her - Halcion - has not been linked to strokes.
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2 comments:
The thought is that the brain may lose or confuse its 'native' accent as a result of the trauma and substitute one of the others it's learned. We 'store' familiar accents, which is why you can adjust to them. This storage might be called upon when our own accent is lost. I forget if I read this in a book by Oliver Sacks or V.S. Ramachandran...but I think it was one or the other.
It is a very beautiful accent.I do not want to sound rude but her interpretation of count Dracula was not Transylvanian but rather Hungarian for they cannot pronounce the sound [w] and their's sounds like [v].We Romanians pronounce [w] just like you do.
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