As anyone who suffers migraines knows, the pain can leave you speechless.
But Sarah Colwill has experienced a much more unusual vocal effect – she now speaks with a Chinese accent.
via Sarah Colwill’s Chinese accent brought on by migraine attack | Mail Online.
Amazing. I wonder what that pathway in the brain looks like…
The permanent vocal changes and speech patterns make me think ischemia rather than just migrain. I’m going to have to research this a bit more.
To label these things as Chinese or some other accents is somewhat of a distortion. We see many patients who have strokes affecting the speech apparatus in ways that cause vowels to be distorted, certain consonants not being able to be pronounced, perhaps changes in voice tonality – I’m guessing that one effect in this woman may have been that her voice became more nasal, a feature of many Asian languages.
To label it as some foreign person’s accent is a judgment call, and in most cases I think would have similarities and dissimilarities.