'I Miss Your French Accent'
Berley Stabler, an avid trumpeter, had a stroke two years ago and also began speaking in a foreign accent. Doctors
believe that the stroke affected the part of his brain that controls speech. (ABC News)
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(Page 2 of 3)
Naming the Problem
Hundreds of miles away in Greenville, S.C., 48-year-old salesman Berley Stabler had some
idea what Bowen was going through.
Two years ago, Stabler had a mild stroke. At first he couldn't even talk. When his voice came
back, it wasn't exactly his.
"People were just stunned; [they'd] come and visit me in the hospital and they almost
wouldn't say anything, and I'd say, it's OK you can say what you think," Stabler said. "And
they'd say, 'You sound German, you sound French, you sound Austrian.'… Their mouths would
drop open. They'd just be amazed."
Eventually, specialists came up with a possible explanation for what happened to Stabler and
Bowen — a rare disorder called foreign-accent syndrome.
Dr. Julius Fridriksson, who studies how the brain recovers from larger strokes, was fascinated
by Stabler's case, and though a bit skeptical he convinced him to come in for testing.
"When he first came down here to the University of South Carolina I was thinking, is this
really, you know, something real?" Fridriksson said. "And I can't say that I didn't believe him
because his accent was very pronounced, and why would anybody ever come up with this off
the top of their head?"
Stabler spent many hours undergoing tests, including having a highly sophisticated MRI scan
done on his brain. Fridriksson said he was amazed by the results.
Pointing to a scan, Fridriksson said, "You can see this small white spot. This is the lesion that
occurred as a result of the stroke. It just so happens the lesion hit a crucial part of that brainspeech network. And what it basically does is that it affects our ability to monitor speech."
In some ways, Stabler's was what you might call a textbook case of foreign accent syndrome.
Other cases are not so clear-cut. Jack Ryalls, a professor at the University of Central Florida,
believes one of his patients, Julie Diechburg, has foreign-accent syndrome, even though there
is no evidence of a brain lesion. She was injured in a terrible car crash and suffers from
memory problems and has exhibited accented speech off and on.
Continued
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