10 Baffling Medical Conditions

Foreign Accent Syndrome

Traumatic events in the brain can have other unusual effects as well. For 52-year-old Canadian Rosemarie Dore, a stroke on the left side of her brain in 2006 led to a very unusual side effect -- she began to speak with a different accent.

Specifically, Dore, who lives on the Western side of Lake Ontario, adopted a distinctively eastern Canadian accent. She has never been to this region, and she does not know anyone from that part of the country.

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"[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.'"

Though rare, foreign accent syndrome is not entirely undocumented in medical literature. Researchers who have 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. Because of her speech, she became the target of anti-German sentiment.

More recent cases include a Florida woman speaking with a British accent, a Japanese woman sounding to other Japanese as if she were Korean and a South Carolina man developing a French-like accent.

"I have only seen a couple of people with [foreign accent syndrome] ... and I've seen a lot of stroke patients in my time," said Dr. Julius Fridriksson, an associate professor of neuroscience at the University of South Carolina who worked with the South Carolina patient. "These folks have brain damage that alters the way the neurological system works."