- NEW YORK -- An American
woman described yesterday how she recovered her voice after a stroke to
discover that she spoke with an English accent, like a cross between Eliza
Doolittle and Sybil Fawlty.
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- Friends and neighbours ostracised Tiffany Roberts, accusing
her of affecting her new way of talking to sound posh, she said.
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- But Mrs Roberts was the victim of a rare medical condition
known as "foreign accent syndrome", a speech disorder caused
by lesions in the brain suffered, in her case, during a stroke.
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- Her new speech patterns, mixing elements of Estuary English,
Cockney, West Country burr and a hint of Aussie but nothing American, came
to light only after months of therapy to help her talk again after the
stroke.
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- At first Mrs Roberts, 57, tried to regain her old pronunciation,
listening to a tape of herself recorded before she was paralysed and temporarily
lost her powers of speech in 1999. In the end she gave up.
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- "I became a recluse two years ago," she told
The Telegraph. "I developed and was diagnosed with agoraphobia because
I couldn't stand hearing anyone say "Oh no, you're not British'."
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- She decided to publicise her case to encourage other
sufferers to come forward and seek treatment and increase understanding
of the condition.
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- "I'm so grateful that I've got a voice at all. I'm
so grateful for being alive. No one would want to inflict this pain on
themselves. I thought I was losing my mind sometimes."
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- The accent is all the more strange because Mrs Roberts
has never been to Britain, has never had a British boyfriend and was not
a fan of British television shows.
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- But she became so desperate she contemplated moving from
Sarasota to start a new life in Britain.
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- "It has to do with vocal tract posture," explained
Prof Jack Ryalls, of the University of Central Florida, who diagnosed her
condition two months ago. "British English has tenser vowels."
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- A tape of her old voice confirms that Mrs Roberts used
to speak several octaves lower and with a broad north-eastern US accent
from her Philadelphia upbringing.
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- "I hear that that part of me died with the stroke,"
she said yesterday after hearing the recording again. "No matter how
much I tried I couldn't get her back.
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- "For the first two years every day I would try and
copy the tape and simulate the voice. I couldn't do it. So I would go to
bed crying and wake up crying."
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- Normally, anyone with an English accent is given an effusive
welcome in the US. But love of the British is matched by contempt for those
who ape a British accent to sound superior.
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- Mrs Roberts, however, had the extra problem of being
seen as a freak. She even adopted anglicisms such as "bloody"
and "loo".
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- Prof Jennifer Gurd, of Hertfordshire University, said:
"The condition is very rare and not part of medical educational dogma,
so it goes unrecognised and untreated."
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- Mrs Roberts was the first recorded case of an American
acquiring a British accent, she added.
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- The first known sufferer was a Norwegian woman injured
during a 1941 air raid who was ostracised after starting to speak Norwegian
with a thick German accent.
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- As for Mrs Roberts, she is determined to make the best
of her new accent and new life.
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- "God let me come out of the stroke," she said.
"I am not going to sit and cry about the accent. My mum said to me:
'If you've got lemons, you make lemonade'."
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- © Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2003.
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