Sarah Colwill is British, but her accent has changed since having a really bad migraine. Usually Foreign Accent Syndrome happens as a result of a stroke. That’s one whomping migraine, I must say. My sympathies.
People identify her accent as Chinese, but I don’t know. I’m leaning toward the idea that it’s not really a complete foreign accent (like you’d get if you were influenced by someone you knew with a foreign accent). I think the syndrome messes with your vowels, people hear you, and then they say, “Gee, you sound ___ (insert name of accent here).”
Here’s a test: If there’s someone in the room with you, play the audio for them, and get them to guess where her accent is from. (They’ll have to guess before the :20 mark because she gives it away then.)
But not only is it messing with her vowels, it also seems to be messing with her morphemes. Notice how she’s dropping endings off words:
And when I did speak, it sound Chinese. That last for about a week. And then I woke up again the next day, it sound more Eastern European. And it have been like that ever since.
I wonder if she was doing that before the migraine.
The saddest thing for me about FAS is how the speaker no longer identifies their voice as their own. Their own voice sounds strange to them.
“The first few weeks of the accent was quite funny but to think I am stuck with this Chinese accent is getting me down. My voice has started to annoy me now. It is not my voice,” added Colwill.
Judi Roberts felt the same way. After her stroke, her American accent changed to what people identified as British. She changed her name to Tiffany Noel, in accordance with her feeling that a part of her had died.
There are worse things that can happen to your brain, of course, but it’s hard to calculate the effect of no longer being able to sound like yourself.
7 May 2010 at 3:34 am
In the second video it surprised me that vocabulary changed too (frock for dress). Is that this a kind of aphasia?
7 May 2010 at 3:59 am
That is puzzling. 'Ere's wot Oi fink.
When the stroke happened, it affected her phonology in ways that were random, but which people identified as British.
At that point, she had to (as the video says) construct a believable new identity, which probably involved finding out about her new 'Britishness'. I think since then, she's taken it on, including vocabulary. Which showed up in the 'test' we saw (which was actually a re-enactment).
By the way, don't you love how the announcer says she was 'afflicted' by a British accent? Thanks a lot! I suppose we could compare the euphony of a British accent versus an 'Indiana lilt'. 😛