Brain and accent

Here’s the story: Boy has brain surgery, and comes out with a posh London accent instead of his unlistenable Northern accent.

“We noticed that he had started to elongate his vowels in words like ‘bath’ which he never did before,” said Mrs McCartney-Moore, 45, a music teacher from York.

“He no longer has short vowel sounds – they are all long. It’s bizarre.”

This is reminding me of Foreign Accent Syndrome, where someone will have (say) a stroke and come out with a new accent. Here’s the current explanation for FAS:

Now researchers at Oxford University have found that patients with “foreign accent syndrome” seem to share certain characteristics which might explain the problem.

A small number of them all had tiny areas of damage in various parts of the brain.

This might explain the combination of subtle changes to vocal features such as lengthening of syllables, altered pitch or mispronounced sounds which make a patient’s pronunciation sound similar to a foreign accent.

But for this case, the surgeon has a slightly different idea: the patient had to relearn his accent after the operation, and did so according to the people around him.

Brain surgeon Paul Eldridge, who works at the specialist Walton Neurological Centre, Liverpool, said it was possible that the infection and abscess had affected the area of the brain which controls language skills, forcing William to learn how to speak again.

“It’s as if he’s re-learnt how to talk from listening to language from sources different to those that prompted his speech first time around.”

The key here is: is he really speaking with an upper-class accent (which could have been learned from someone else), or is it just the elongated vowels that makes people think he’s talking with an upper-class accent? How long does it take to acquire an accent, anyway?