{"id":136,"date":"2018-05-28T16:11:48","date_gmt":"2018-05-28T23:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/linguamonium.com\/?p=136"},"modified":"2021-04-25T20:16:44","modified_gmt":"2021-04-25T20:16:44","slug":"foreign-accent-syndrome-and-speech-understanding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linguamonium.com\/?p=136","title":{"rendered":"Foreign accent syndrome and speech understanding"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Maybe you\u2019ve heard about people who, due to a stroke or accident, can no longer speak or understand speech normally. <strong>Aphasia <\/strong>is a condition where damage (usually from stroke or head trauma) to particular regions of the brain causes a person to lose specific language production and comprehension abilities. Aphasia studies are remarkable, and have taught us much about how language works inside the brain. Recently, however, I learned of a strange condition kind of similar to, but not as debilitating as aphasia: Foreign accent syndrome.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s the article: <a href=\"http:\/\/theweek.com\/articles\/763187\/curious-case-people-who-cant-stop-speaking-foreign-accents\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The curious case of people who can\u2019t stop speaking in foreign accents<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>You should read the full piece, but a few highlights follow.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\">\u201cForeign accent syndrome (FAS for short) is a real thing, though it&#8217;s very rare \u2014 fewer than 200 cases diagnosed since it was first described in 1907. It may sound like it&#8217;s just a delusion or fantasy, but fewer than 10 percent of cases have a psychological basis (for example, related to schizophrenia). Nearly all of the rest are of neurological origin: They are caused by damage or impairment to a specific area of the brain.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\">\u201cThe short explanation is that FAS (possibly excepting the few psychological cases) is a disorder of speech planning and execution.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 60px;\">\u201cNaturally, when we hear speech tweaked on one or several of those parameters, we associate it with an accent that has a similar feature set. And if we hear an accent that sounds somehow different but we&#8217;re not sure, we make our best guess at what it is. The less familiar we are with an accent, the less we&#8217;re likely to notice things that aren&#8217;t quite right about it: Many Americans can&#8217;t tell Australian accents from English ones even though people from England and Australia have no trouble telling the two apart. Researchers studying cases of FAS have sometimes tested samples of the speech with listeners who didn&#8217;t know its origin to see if they could identify where it was from, and, unsurprisingly, opinions varied considerably. But when they tested &#8220;controls&#8221; \u2014 samples of native speakers with unimpaired speech from several countries \u2014 listeners couldn&#8217;t always identify\u00a0<em>their<\/em>\u00a0accents accurately either.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Videos of people with FAS:<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=szJtcj-JVFk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Texan woman with \u201cBritish English\u201d accent<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=NxY9ThN-KiI\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">English woman with \u201cChinese\u201d accent<\/a><\/p>\n<p>What does the author mean by <em>feature set<\/em> in the quote above? Each language has its own unique set of <strong>phonemes <\/strong>or word-distinguishing units of sound (called its <strong>phonemic inventory<\/strong>). This set is pulled from a larger set of all possible speech sounds. We recognize different languages and accents by these feature sets. And yet, the FAS article had me thinking about our general ineptitude when it comes to identifying accents. Because the speech of the person with FAS in the first video is <em>close enough <\/em>to a British English accent from an American English point of view, we lump it in that category\u2026while to a native British English speaker, they\u2019re noticeably dissimilar. Even in our native accent, speech can be hard to disambiguate. The recent viral <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/interactive\/2018\/05\/16\/upshot\/audio-clip-yanny-laurel-debate.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u201cLaurel\/Yanny\u201d debate<\/a>\u00a0is a good example.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cLaurel\u201d\/\u201cYanny\u201d makes you wonder how we understand each other at all. I\u2019d say that <strong>pragmatics<\/strong>, i.e. context, plays a vital role. When communication is stripped of context, it\u2019s significantly more difficult to interpret. My current work has made this very clear to me. We\u2019re listening to and transcribing 2-to-4-second audio clips of users\u2019 commands (and other speech) to their smartphone voice assistants. Knowing the contexts of \u201cvoice assistant-directed speech\u201d and \u201cthings one might want to do on their phone\u201d helps some. But outside of that, because the sound clips are so short and we\u2019re not actually there, interacting with the speaker, a part of the conversation \u2013 it\u2019s often a challenge to resolve (i.e. accurately transcribe) certain categories of words. Proper nouns are especially tricky. Contacts\u2019 names, product or app names, names of unfamiliar towns and musicians, et cetera.\u00a0 If we were face-to-face with the speaker, we\u2019d have the entire conversational, situational, and interpersonal background at our disposal, which helps resolve such unknowns.<\/p>\n<p>Successful communication must rely on many factors. And language doesn&#8217;t exist in a vacuum.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Maybe you\u2019ve heard about people who, due to a stroke or accident, can no longer speak or understand speech normally. Aphasia is a condition where damage (usually from stroke or head trauma) to particular regions of the brain causes a person to lose specific language production and comprehension abilities. Aphasia studies are remarkable, and have&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":137,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[2,16,19,21,23],"tags":[41,63,76,103,146,155],"class_list":["post-136","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-accents","category-languages","category-neurolinguistics","category-phonetics-phonology","category-pragmatics","tag-aphasia","tag-context","tag-fas","tag-language-comprehension","tag-pronunciation","tag-spectrogram"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Foreign accent syndrome and speech understanding - Linguamonium<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/linguamonium.com\/?p=136\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Foreign accent syndrome and speech understanding - Linguamonium\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Maybe you\u2019ve heard about people who, due to a stroke or accident, can no longer speak or understand speech normally. 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