Personal injury news

Brain injury causes woman to speak with different accent

A Newcastle lady who suffered a brain injury has started to talk in a distinctive accent that can be described as definitely not Geordie.

Linda Walker, 60, came around after having a stroke and surprised friends and family with her newly-discovered accent, which seems to be a blend of Jamaican, Eastern European and French Canadian.

She was upset with the change in her accent and said, "I got very down about it at first. It is so strange because you don't feel like the same person. I didn't realise what I sounded like but then my speech therapist played a tape of me talking. I was devastated."

The accent change is known as Foreign Accent Syndrome and is thought to be caused when a brain injury causes damage to the area of the brain controlling speech. It is a relatively rare result of this kind of brain injury, although some speech therapists say that they see around 4 or 5 cases a year.

Nick Miller, a lecturer at Newcastle University, explained more about the condition, saying, "The accent varies from ear to ear. Two people could hear the same accent and one would say it was Jamaican and the other East European.

"The stroke has affected the coordination between different muscle groups like the lips, tongue and vocal cords. The balance has been changed and certain sounds get distorted so vowels and consonants take on different sounds.

"Intonation is also affected so sometimes it will fall at the end of a sentence and sometimes it will rise."

As well as resulting from strokes, Foreign Accent Syndrome can also occur after a severe head injury. This was the case in an early reported instance of the syndrome, in which a Norwegian lady was hit by shrapnel in World War II and woke up speaking with a German accent.