Music & Language Studies

[Update pending. Look for review of Kurowski, Blumstein, and Alexander (1996).]

What has been dubbed foreign accent syndrome was first described by Monrad-Krohn in 1947,¹ in which he presented the case of a woman who suffered a shrapnel wound in WWII, that damaged portions of the left hemisphere of her brain. Her ability to produce and comprehend language was mostly spared, except for the odd effect to her speech prosody that others perceived as a foreign accent. In that particular case, sounding German in Oslo just following WWII was not an easy thing.

What must be pointed out however is that no one ever has been reported in the neurological literature spontaneously, or as a result of head injury, to have begun speaking a foreign tongue. The term foreign accent syndrome, as well as some of the descriptions that have accompanied the term, is a bit of a misnomer, in that it implies the patients of FAS somehow acquire the accent of a particular foreign language. Rather, the perception of hearers is that the prosody is somehow off, leading them to entertain the theory that the speaker is non-native in the language.

Apparently, this perception can be the result of a set of specific factors that combine to lend the appearance that the speaker comes from a particular language group. However, no study that I know of has yet articulated the particular factors of speech that correspond directly to a hearer’s supposition that the patient speaks with a French or a Greek accent. The accent appears in the mind of the hearer, not necessarily in the voice of the speaker.

A better descriptor of this syndrome would be simply as one of the aprosodias,² which as a class refer to disturbances of productive or receptive prosodic processing. One thing to be noted however is that prosody is a widely distributed behavior as Monrad-Krohn himself had noted (cf. Monrad-Krohn, 1963). More recently, the aprosodias have been studied extensively by Elliott D. Ross and colleagues.

In most cases, as described in the literature, they appear to be the result of right hemisphere damage, in particular damage to regions homologous to the left hemisphere “language areas” (most especially the so-called Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas). It should be noted that the case described by Monrad-Krohn in 1947 however was not caused by right hemisphere damage. In part that can be explained in that it principally entailed deficits to tonal accents of the language, rather than affective manipulations of pitch, which have been more more prominent in the work of Ross and colleagues.

The issue of brain processing involved with the production and reception of speech prosody is a hugely complicated one, in part because similar affects to prosody may be the result of divergent and dissociable activities. A great deal more research needs to take place in this domain before deep conclusions can be drawn. Music and language studies has much to contribute in this domain.

¹ Kurowski, Blumstein, and Alexander (1996) cite an earlier case from 1919.

² Kurowski, Blumstein, and Alexander (1996) challenges this notion, noting that foreign accent syndrome is dissociable from the aprosodias. In particular, they indicate that FAS is invariably the result of left hemisphere damage, whereas aprosodias tend to be the result of RH damage.