What would you think if you ever woke up speaking your mother tongue with an accent from another country?You’d suffer from what scientists call foreign accent syndrome (SSE) or pseudo-foreign.
This phenomenon was described by the French neurologist Pierre Marie in 1907, who recounts the case of a Parisian woman who, after suffering a stroke, begins to speak with an Alsatian accent.
- Foreign accent syndrome is a rare neurological speech disorder documented in no more than twenty specific studies.
As a consequence of a brain injury, mainly subcortical, the patient’s speech acquires a strange sound for native listeners, since the person cannot avoid this strange accent, and given its sudden onset, this disorder can generate the feeling of loss of identity .
Symptoms may persist for months or years or disappear spontaneously or progressively; in a smaller number of cases, it appears briefly in patients with psychiatric disorders, schizophrenia and conversion disorders.
In addition, many affected people do not recognize that their accent has changed and are surprised when others point out that this has happened.
“The limits of my language are the limits of my mind. “- Ludwig Wittgenstein-
This syndrome is clinically characterized by deficits
The main difficulties that arise are:
Although there is no evidence of functional changes in daily life, the emotional involvement of this disorder often leads to the onset of adverse psychosocial consequences on the lives of these patients, as described in various studies.
“In the language is the family tree of a nation. “- Samuel Johnson-
It is an unforeseen language disorder that changes the language pattern of the mother tongue, so the patient, his family and the therapist perceive a different dialect from their mother tongue.
Among the main aetiologies associated with this syndrome are strokes, brain injuries, which affect areas related to language production and expression, as well as other pathologies, such as multiple sclerosis, brain tumors or anesthesia, among other causes.
As mentioned above, foreign accent syndrome can persist for months or years or disappear spontaneously or gradually.
However, there are people who become chronic, requiring cognitive and speech therapy, as this disease can have a significant psychological impact on the affected person. The person realizes that time passes and that he is unable to find his true voice and sometimes does not even remember it.
“All human organs get tired at some point except the tongue. “- Konrad Adenauer-
So far, the most common treatment in these cases is the application of therapies and language techniques that allow those affected to recover, if not completely, in part, their diction before the onset of the syndrome.
In addition, accent reduction techniques are used and the patient learns to move the lips or jaw more appropriately during speech.
In 2010, scientists from the University of Malaga combined these rehabilitation exercises with the prescription of the drug donepezil, commonly used to treat Alzheimer’s disease.
Thanks to this joint treatment, recovery symptoms?Very visible, in a Spanish patient with the disease. Other techniques may include: masked hearing feedback, delayed hearing feedback, and hearing rate change feedback.