The following is from yesterday's paper version of the Washington Post. Haven't been able to find it on line, so will quote some of it (it's a fascinating subject):
Fairfax woman's accent takes on a Russian tone, by Brigid Schulte
"Some people fall on their heads and wake up with their memory wiped out. A few revive with their personality totally changed. Others die. Robin Jenks Vanderlip fell down a stairwell, smacked her head and woke up speaking with a Russian accent.
Vanderlip has never been to Russia. She doesn't remember ever hearing a Russian accent. She lives in Fairfax County, was born in Pennsylvania and went to college on the eastern Shore. Yet since that fall in May 2007, the first question she gets from strangers is: "Where are you from?"
"they say your life can change in an instant," she said in what sounds like a thick Russian accent. "Mine did."
For 42 years, Vanderlip, whose case is being studied at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Maryland, spoke with what NIH neurologist Allen R. Braun called a typical mid-Atlantic American accent.
Two days after her fall, Vanderlip awoke unable to speak. A friend called 911, and she was rushed to Fair Oaks Hospital, where an MRI showed she'd had a stroke. Working with a speech therapist, she could make rudimentary sounds and slowly relearned how to speak - but with a Russian-sounding accent.
But since her fall, her clipped way with consonants - dropping the final "s" frm some plural words,, saying "dis" and "dat" for "this" and "that," or "wiz" instead of "with" - and her formation of vowels - "home" sounds more like "herm," "well" sounds like "wuhl" - identify her more like a transplant from Moscow.
What she has, Braun and other doctors say, is Foreign Accent Syndrome - a rare and little understood medical condition that can follow a serious brain injury. "It does sound strange," Braun said. "It certainly does sound like someone has a foreign accent."
The syndrome was first described by a neurologist in the closing days of World War II. A Norwegian woman hit in the head by shrapnel fell into a coma and woke up speaking with a German accent. Fellow Norwegians ostracized her as a result, according to the medical literature.
'Somebody's joke'
"The first time I heard about Foreign Accent Syndrome, I thought, "This is not true; this is somebody's joke, " said Julius Fridricksson, who has studied brain images of patients suffering from the malady at the University of South Carolina, and who, as a native of Iceland, speaks English with a slight accent.
Then he began working with a patient who had spoken with a Southern U.S. accent all his life but woke from a stroke sounding like a proper British gent. "This was an accent he could not control."
~
Shelia Blumstein, a Brown University linguist who has written extensively on Foreign Accent Syndrome, said sufferers typically produce grammatically correct language, unlike many stroke or brain-injury victims. But subtle changes in intonation and melody make syndrome sufferers sound foreign. No amount of therapy, she said, seems to reverse that.
~
www.washingtonpost.comNote from me (libby): When my daughter was born, I shared a hospital room with a woman about my age, and we traded a lot of interesting stories. I've long since forgotten her name, but remember one fascinating story she told.
One of her grandmothers was seriously ill and not expected to recover. I don't remember if she had a stroke, or ...but she did live, and when she was able to speak again, she spoke German (not native to her or anyone else that they knew of in their family). And that continued until the day she died.
libby
Linkback: http://4seasonschat.com/index.php/topic,14965.msg162913.html#msg162913
Topic: VA Woman Speaks with Russian Accent After Head Injury (Read 402 times)
