Stroke Victims Pick Up Foreign Accents

Jan. 3 -- Tiffany Roberts and Cindy Langdon sounded like typical American women just a few years ago. But when they suffered strokes, they underwent a change they never expected — they both developed foreign accents.

Roberts, 57, has never been to the United Kingdom, but after suffering a stroke four years ago, she sounds as if she spent most of her life in London.

Meanwhile, Langdon, of Shawnee Mission, Kan., now sounds as if she is a native of France, although doesn't speak French and has been to Paris only once.

Roberts, who now lives in Sarasota, Fla., grew up in Indiana and has had little exposure to any foreign accents.

She says the change has emotionally devastated her because some people believe she is faking it.

"I should deserve an Academy Award if I could do that for four years, wouldn't I?" Roberts told ABCNEWS' Good Morning America.

Roberts says she struggled to cope with the new voice until doctors gave her an explanation for why the change had taken place.

Roberts and Langdon have both been diagnosed with "foreign accent syndrome" as a result of their strokes.Only a tiny number of patients have been diagnosed with the syndrome since it was first discovered back in the 1940s.

The first recorded case of foreign accent syndrome was in 1941, when a Norwegian woman suffered a shrapnel injury to the head during a World War II air raid. After a struggle to communicate again, she wound up with a strong German accent.

Only a handful of cases of foreign accent syndrome have ever been reported, and until recently, some doctors dismissed the problem as more likely to be psychiatric in origin than physical.

But in the last few years researchers at Oxford University have discovered that those suffering with the syndrome seem to share important characteristics.They suffered tiny areas of damage in various parts of the brain due to an injury or a stroke.

Doctors say the various areas of damage could combine to result in subtle changes to vocal features and cause victims to alter their pitch and lengthen syllables. In some cases the changes will cause the victim to mispronounce certain sounds.