By Mark Leyner and Dr. Billy Goldberg
Imagine an accidental bop on the head changed your accent from the grating stridence of Fran Drescher to the dulcet, euphonious tones of, say, Kate Winslet. Or if you’re a man, what if a whack to the forehead transformed your speech from something out of Homer Simpson's pie-hole to the adorably urbane voice of Stewie Griffin from “Family Guy?”
That kind of bizarre voice change happened for real to a woman from Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. Recent newspaper reports and a cable TV show featured CindyLou Romberg, who split her head from front to back after falling out of a moving car in 1981. Despite the serious brain injury, after her awful headaches and lingering back pain abated, she resumed a normal life as a caregiver and motorcycle enthusiast.
Until her back started bothering her again about a year ago.
After visiting a local chiropractor, Romberg soon began speaking gibberish.When she began speaking normally again, she had a German accent, tinged with what some friends thought was vaguely French or Russian. This strange accent was coming from an American woman who had never studied a foreign language, nor been to any foreign country, except Canada.
Romberg was diagnosed with Foreign Accent Syndrome, a neurologically-based speech disorder most probably caused by her traumatic brain injury. Although this particular diagnosis is rare — only 50 or 60 cases have been verified worldwide — other problems following traumatic brain injury, such as aphasia (the loss or impairment to use or comprehend words) or stroke, are not uncommon. The delay of so many years before the appearance of symptoms makes Romberg's case especially unusual.
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We recognize that traumatic brain injuries can cause myriad personality changes in patients — everything from paranoia, nihilistic delusions, lethargy, mania, impulsiveness, a tendency towards various kinds of disinhibited behavior like sexual promiscuity and frenetic gambling. The wife of a patient treated at the Johns Hopkins Brain Injury Clinic reported that after her husband eventually recovered from the brain injuries he suffered from a serious motorcycle accident, he became unusually cheerful, talking nonstop, and spending excessive amounts of time in karaoke bars. He was also uncharacteristically preoccupied with Internet pornography.
But there's something uniquely and irresistibly fanciful about the story of CindyLou Romberg. It has almost a fairly tale quality to it. Go to sleep as a normal American, wake up as an exotic European.
What really happened to her? According to a recent article in the Journal of Neurolinguistics, “foreign accent syndrome” is something of a misnomer. Following a stroke or severe brain injury, these patients don't actually manifest a speech pattern that corresponds to any particular language. What's going on is that they are displaying changes in the rhythms, stresses and intonations of their speech that listeners mistakenly ascribe to a new and different accent. Most cases of "foreign accent syndrome" are associated with injuries to the left hemisphere of the brain, which is associated with language.
Even the voices we hear in our heads after an accident can develop speech impairments. A medical journal recently reported a woman who, as the result of a brain injury from a bicycle accident, developed aphasia, rendering her able to only speak in very short sentences and single words. She also began having audio hallucinations of voices that shared her very speech problems. The voices she hallucinated expressed themselves in short sentences or single words.
Neuroscience is an endlessly fascinating field, and there is so much about the brain that we are only beginning to understand. The neurological source of Peter Sellers' accent as Inspector Clouseau in the "Pink Panther" movies and, most spectacularly, Al Pacino's bizarre dialect as Tony Montana in "Scarface" ("Say hello to my little friend!") remain profound mysteries.
