Rare Syndrome Causes Woman to Speak With a Foreign Accent

July 10, 2008— -- Rosemarie Dore didn't feel as if anything was wrong that Thursday morning. She took a shower, got dressed and headed off to the coffee and doughnut shop at which she worked.

But once she was at work, Dore felt weak, confused -- and she was acting a little funny.

"My girlfriend said I was playing with my hair, and I never do that kind of thing," said Dore, a 52-year-old Canadian resident of Hamilton, on the western shores of Lake Ontario.

Despite never feeling entirely awful, she chose to go to Hamilton General Hospital. It turned out that Dore had had a stroke on the left side of her brain; she would end up spending the entire summer and some of the fall of 2006 in stroke care.

Other stroke patients have similar stories, but what's unusual about Dore's case is what happened to her speech during her recovery -- she started to speak in a distinctively eastern Canadian accent. But Dore has never been to the Maritime region and does not know anyone from that part of the country.

Health care workers who met with Dore after the stroke assumed she was from Canada's east coast.

"[There was a] nurse that was from Newfoundland, "Dore told ABC News. "She comes down the hall, and she come into the room and she says, 'Who's the Newfie here?'" referring to Newfoundland.

"I said, 'There's nobody here like that.'"

"And she said, 'I think I'm talking to her.'"

Dore wasn't trying to speak with anything other than her native southern Ontario accent, but she couldn't help it. And she could hear the difference in her speech -- almost as if the words were coming from someone else.

"My kids, they were all teasing me," said Dore. "They say I really make the 'O' sound."

Doctors diagnosed Dore with foreign accent syndrome -- a very literal description for a rare speech condition that can happen after a brain injury, usually after a stroke.

Researchers who've studied the syndrome estimate there are only as many as 60 legitimate recorded cases.

One of the first known patients was reported after World War II by Norwegian neurologist Georg Herman Monrad-Krohn. He described a Norwegian woman who was hit on the head by a bomb fragment during the war and began to speak with a German-like accent. Due to her speech, she became the target of anti-German sentiment.