Previous research has shown that the two languages of early bilingual children can influence each other, depending on linguistic property, while adult bilinguals predominantly show from majority language to minority (heritage) language. While this observed shift in patterns is probably related a dominance between childhood and adulthood, there little data documenting it. Our study investigates ...

In three cross-modal priming experiments we asked whether adaptation to a foreign-accented speaker is automatic, and whether adaptation can be seen after a long delay between initial exposure and test. Dutch listeners were exposed to a Hebrew-accented Dutch speaker with two types of Dutch words: those that contained [I] (globally accented words), and those in which the Dutch [i] was shortened t...

It is well known that vowel duration may differ across languages. In foreign language learning these differences may lead to incorrectly produced durations in the target language, since the speaker will be inhibited by his mother tongue. In this paper two experirnents are reported. The fust describes a production test, airned at obtaining a systernatic description of durations of comparable vow...

BACKGROUND We describe a patient who presented a unique variation of the previously described acquired foreign accent syndrome. CASE DESCRIPTION A 65-year-old women developed an Irish brogue immediately after a deep left hemisphere stroke. The newly accented speech possibly represented a previously learned speech pattern. CONCLUSIONS Suppressed prosodic speech patterns may reemerge in the s...

BACKGROUND Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a rare speech disorder characterized by the appearance of a new accent, different from the speaker's native language and perceived as foreign by the speaker and the listener. In most of the reported cases, FAS follows stroke but has also been found following traumatic brain injury, cerebral haemorrhage and multiple sclerosis. In very few cases, FAS wa...