More About FAS

2007 International Conference
Acoustical Society of America
Salt Lake City, UT.

Effects of accent-reduction techniques for the treatment of an individual with Foreign Accent Syndrome.

Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare speech motor disorder characterized by the emergence of a perceived foreign accent following brain damage. Although FAS has received increased attention in recent years, the issue of intervention for this disorder has not been systematically explored.

In this study, an English-speaking female patient with FAS thought to sound "Swedish" was given short-term accent reduction treatment for selected front vowels (/i/, /I/, / E/), back vowels (/u/, /U/, /o/) and inter-dental consonants (voiced "th", unvoiced "th").

Therapy consisted of structured practice on word lists containing targeted phonemes. A list of compound nouns was included as untreated control items. A multiple-baseline across behaviors design was used to determine treatment efficacy. Probes were included for response generalization, maintenance, and long-term retention.

Digitally-recorded productions by the FAS talker were played in randomized order to a phonetically-trained listener who rated a targeted sound in each word as "foreign-sounding" or not. Results indicated highly variable performance on treated items, generalization probes, and control probes throughout the course of the experiment, with no apparent acquisition or maintenance resulting from the intervention.

These findings suggest that structured intervention techniques were not successful for this patient.