The common denominator in the perception of accents in cases with foreign accent syndrome

Abstract

ABSTRACTBackground: Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare speech disorder leading to a perceived presence of a new accent in a speaker’s speech. Until now, around 100 cases of FAS have been reported. It is striking that in most cases the perception of the accent is in one consistent direction, namely from languages like English or Dutch to accents of Romance, Germanic, Eastern European or tonal languages.Aims: In this article, we will try to come up with an overarching explanation for the accent changes seen in FAS, relating these changes to force of articulation.Main Contribution: We assume that the foreign accent in FAS is interpreted on the basis of the stereotypical segmental and prosodic characteristics that relate to the phonetics and phonology of specific languages. We hypothesise that the direction in perception of a FAS accent will go from a language characterised by relatively more lenition processes, into languages with relatively more fortition characteristics in their phonetic realisations and phonological system and not the other way around. Accents are expected to change from stress-timed to syllable-timed languages, from weight-sensitive stress systems to weight-insensitive systems, from non-aspirated to aspirated systems, and within these language groups from languages characterised by, for example, relatively more reduction and assimilation processes to languages with relatively less lenition. We have tested our hypothesis with the already described FAS cases. We restricted ourselves to the cases of neurogenic FAS described in English and to which enough details were provided in order to be able to judge the change of accent.Conclusions: From the 58 cases that fitted with these criteria, almost 90% showed a change of accent in the expected direction or did not contradict our hypothesis. Only six accent changes did not directly support it. The reported phonetic descriptions of the cases, if available, nevertheless suggest that they do not seem to completely violate our hypothesis.