A rare and mysterious syndrome that causes people to sound foreign has become even more baffling. Until now, the condition has been linked with damage in certain brain areas, but researchers have found two people with no trace of brain damage who have nevertheless sounded foreign since childhood.

This could prompt neurologists and linguists to rethink the origins of foreign accent syndrome (FAS) and may even point toward a genetic cause, Peter Mariën, a neurolinguist at Middelheim General Hospital and Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, Belgium, who led the study with Jo Verhoeven, a phonetician at City University London. “There is no such thing as one simple recipe that explains what happens to a person who has foreign accent syndrome,” he says.

Brain damage or developmental problems could occur in brain circuits responsible for the timing, tone and pronunciation of speech, causing accents to sound foreign.

“They know perfectly what to say,” Mariën says. “They have the idea, they have the concept, but the organisation of the articulation patterns is disrupted.”


Ear of the beholder

People with FAS aren’t reverting to a childhood accent or one they picked up from others, says Sheila Blumstein, a cognitive linguist at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who was not involved in the study. They just sound foreign. “A lot of us have concluded that foreign accent syndrome is in the ears of the beholder,” she says.

One person’s Czech-sounding accent could remind another person of Russian and yet another of French. In fact, studies of FAS patients have shown that listeners show little agreement in assigning an accent to a particular language.

That was certainly true for the people that Mariën’s team studied. Different listeners in a panel thought a 29-year-old woman known as TL sounded French, German, Scandinavian or Moroccan when she spoke her native Dutch. KL, a 7-year-old boy, sounded like a native Frenchman to most, but Moroccan, Asian or African to others.

Neither patient had a history of brain trauma, and, in the case of KL, magnetic-resonance brain imaging showed no abnormalities. This stands in stark contrast to most other people with FAS, who have lesions or damage in brain areas thought to be involved in speech and language.

“If it is a neural system, as we’re sure it is, then it’s certainly possible that even in developmental stages [FAS] might emerge,” Blumstein says.

The possibility of a developmental origin for FAS suggests that genetic mutations could be associated with the syndrome. Mariën’s team has begun working with a young woman with signs of FAS who says that her sister speaks similarly. “Can we identify, in these developmental cases, a genetic basis?” he wonders.

Journal reference: Cortex (vol 45, p 870)