The doctor said that foreign accent syndrome is a language disorder, which will cause sudden changes in speech, and foreign accents will suddenly be mixed in when the patient speaks their mother tongue; the situation is shown, and the characters in the picture have nothing to do with this article.

(picture taken from freepik)

[Health Channel/Comprehensive Report] A 50-year-old Italian woman whose mother tongue is Italian, but suddenly suffered from speaking and writing barriers, and was sent to the emergency room after speaking unclearly for about 5 minutes.

Medical staff said that the patient may have injured a cranial nerve due to confirmed COVID-19, causing Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS).

The doctor said that foreign accent syndrome is a language disorder that causes sudden changes in speech. When patients speak their native language, foreign accents will suddenly be mixed in, but it is very rare caused by COVID19.

Physician Huang Xuan, a thoracic and intensive care specialist, posted on the Facebook page "Dr. Ooi Hean" that patients with foreign accent syndrome may have never been exposed to a language other than their native language, but they speak with a foreign accent and cannot standardize Use your native language fluently.

There are only more than 100 patients with foreign accent syndrome in the world. There may be two factors that lead to foreign accent syndrome:

Please read on...

Brain injury:

Most of the current cases are caused by neurological diseases such as stroke, traumatic brain injury, brain tumor or multiple sclerosis. Among the patients with such neurological impairment, the proportion of women is more than that of men, and more than half of the patients suffer from foreign diseases after stroke. Accent Syndrome.

There may be abnormalities in parts of the brain, such as the motor cortex, premotor cortex or basal ganglia, and the prefrontal base of the brain, or Broca's area, which is particularly important for language production. Depending on the location of the injury, speech may be abnormal. There is no way to control the pitch, syllable or pronunciation, and there will be problems with the natural consonant and vowel conversion.

●Psychiatric diseases:

Some studies have also pointed out that the symptoms of foreign accent syndrome may be related to the patients themselves suffering from schizophrenia, depression and conversion symptoms.

In addition, when some patients combine sentences, they also have problems with disordered order.

However, Huang Xuan pointed out that if the accent can change slightly, or a new accent appears after living abroad for a while, it is basically not a foreign accent syndrome.

Neurologist Whitaker first published in 1982, the diagnostic criteria for foreign accent syndrome:

●The patient does not speak a language other than his native language and has a history of central nervous system impairment.

●Exclude psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia or depression.

●Evaluate the patient's language expression and comprehension ability through clinical tests.

●Do a brain MRI scan to see if there are tumors, hemorrhage, infarction, cerebral edema or other brain diseases in the brain.

Huang Xuan said that at present, the medical field has limited treatment methods for foreign accent syndrome. Most of them are based on the symptoms of individual cases, helping patients to adjust, pronounce, and strengthen semantic understanding.

One of the symptoms of this disease is the movement disorder of the mouth, tongue and jaw. Therefore, when patients practice oral movements, if they have visual and auditory feedback as a reference, they can also help them relearn, imitate, and regain their original Speech, language therapy is the main treatment for these patients.

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  • aphasia

  • speech therapy

  • COVID-19

  • foreign accent syndrome

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