Speech Communication / Communication par la parole

1. i n t r o d u c t i o n We present detailed phonetic analyses of a 61 year-old monolingual female English speaker. The speaker from Halifax, Nova Scotia, acquired a speech disorder from a motor vehicle accident. The disordered speech was detected three years after the brain injury she suffered from the accident, and perceived by her family and friends as being similar to Southern U.S. dialect or Scottish English. It is reported that her disordered speech is a rare but possible case of Foreign Accent Syndrome (FAS; Louch 2009). FAS may lead to long-term muscular adjustments of the vocal apparatus that lead to changes in articulatory, phonatory, prosodic settings (Moen, 2000). There is considerable variability among reported cases of FAS in terms of phonetic characteristics and impairments (Varley, Whiteside, Hammill & Cooper, 2006). We hypothesize that one of the factors that make the accent change in her speech is due to a change in her rhythmic characteristics. In order to test the hypothesis, we calculated %V (proportion of vocalic duration over the total duration of an utterance) as a measure of rhythm. In order to find out factors that may affect the %V value, we further conducted detailed phonetic analyses to understand the impact of the speaker’s speech characteristics on the %V that deviates from that of Canadian English. The results indicate that both phonetic and phonological factors contribute to her non-canonical rhythmic pattern.