Recovering prosody of a case of foreign accent syndrome

Abstract

Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS) is a rare disorder characterized by the emergence of a perceived foreign accent following brain damage. In this case study, acoustic analyses were performed on the speech of a Mandarin-speaking female FAS patient at her four doctor’s appointments. The reading materials included news in newspaper and a tongue twister. The acoustic analyses include sentence-level intonation and rhythmic measures including %V and PVIs. Results reveal a gradual recovery trajectory from a disfluent stressed-timed pattern to a fluent syllable-timed pattern. A heritage Mandarin speaker and an advanced nonnative speaker recorded the same reading materials. Same acoustic analyses were performed on their speech for comparison.