Foreign Accent Syndrome

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare speech disorder characterized by the emergence of a foreign accent. To date, more than a hundred cases of FAS have been reported, and the impression of accent change is regarded to be the result of a combination of segmental deficits (i.e., phonetic distortions and phonemic paraphasias) and supra-segmental changes (i.e., stress, pitch, or rhythm variation). The most common etiology of FAS is stroke, followed by other causes. Various lesion locations have been identified to cause FAS. Owing to various heterogeneous etiologies and lesion locations, it remains controversial whether there is enough consistency or universality to treat FAS as a "syndrome".