Some people fall on their heads and wake up with their memories wiped out. A few revive with their personalities totally changed. Others die. Robin Jenks Vanderlip fell down a stairwell, smacked her head and woke up speaking with a Russian accent.
Vanderlip has never been to Russia. She doesn't remember ever hearing a Russian accent. She lives in Fairfax County, was born in Pennsylvania and went to college on the Eastern Shore. Yet since that fall in May 2007, the first question she gets from strangers is: "Where are you from?" "They say your life can change in an instant," she said in what sounds like a thick Russian accent. "Mine did."
For 42 years, Vanderlip, whose case is being studied at the National Institutes of Health and the University of Maryland, spoke with what NIH neurologist Allen Braun called a typical mid-Atlantic American accent. But since the fall, her clipped way with consonants - dropping the final "s" from some plural words, saying "dis" and "dat" for "this" and "that" or "wiz" instead of "with" - and her formation of vowels - "home" sounds more like "herm," "well" sounds like "wuhl" - identify her more like a transplant from Moscow. The more fatigued she becomes, the thicker her accent grows.
What she has, Braun and other doctors say, is Foreign Accent Syndrome - a legitimate though rare and little understood medical condition that can follow a serious brain injury. "It does sound strange," Braun said. "It certainly does sound like someone has a foreign accent." The syndrome was first described by a neurologist in the closing days of World War II, when a Norwegian woman injured by a shrapnel hit to the head fell into a coma and woke up speaking - most unfortunately for her - with a German accent. (Fellow Norwegians ostracized her as a result, according to the medical literature.) Since then, fewer than 60 cases have been reported worldwide.
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