Neurogenic Stuttering - So Much We Know, So Much We Still Need To Discover!

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Re: The Brain and Stuttering

From: Luc De Nil
Date: 13 Oct 2007
Time: 13:44:27 -0500
Remote Name: 99.234.17.92

Comments

Very good questions and once to which we don't really know the answer. From the literature it seems that damage to any area of the brain may result in acquired stuttering, but this is probably the result of the distributed nature of the neural speech and language network. Damage to one link may affect the whole system. However, this does of course not explain why stuttering would result, as opposed to let's say apraxia or aphasia, or any other disorder. There has been some speculation that stuttering results when the basal ganglia or a neural region that interacts with the basal ganglia has been damaged, but this is still an hypothesis, although a very interesting one, that needs to be confirmed. To date there have been no functional or structural imaging studies published that have directly compared the brains of people with developmental and neurogenic stuttering, but this is much needed if we want to understand the disorder in more detail. Hopefully that data will become available in the next few years.


Last changed: 10/23/07