Ever wonder how a girl from Detroit ended up with a British accent? Well, you know, sometimes you just wake up with an accent. Seriously. There are dozens—dozens!—of documented cases of Foreign Accent System.
One woman's story, after the jump.
From ABC News:
CindyLou Romberg sounds like she could be from any number of exotic countries around the world. She sometimes rolls her "R"s like a Russian, chops syllables like a German or turns an unsuspecting "W" into a "V," like a Swede. But Romberg is not Russian, German or Swedish. In fact, she has never even left her tiny hometown of Port Angeles, Wash. Romberg suffers from what doctors call Foreign Accent Syndrome, or FAS, an extremely rare brain disorder that, as the name implies, causes its sufferers to speak as if they are from a foreign country. "We'll be in the grocery store and someone will come up and say, 'Oh, you have a beautiful accent. Where are you from?'" Romberg told "Good Morning America."
The syndrome is likely related to an accident in 1981 when CindyLou suffered a depressed skull fracture after falling out of a moving truck, scientists say. She recovered from a severe brain injury, and spoke normally until just two years ago when she lost her voice for a couple of days after a visit with a chiropractor.
When her voice came back, it was not the one she had grown up with."She may have suffered a small episode of decreased blood supply to the brain during the manipulation that provided an additional injury, which led to the FAS," neuroscientist Julius Fridriksson said.
Fridriksson said that FAS comes from a trauma to the left side of the brain in an area responsible for speech.
Watch the video here.
[ABC via BWE]
Related:
