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From: Roger Ingham
Date: 10/8/02
Time: 2:07:30 PM
Remote Name: 128.111.217.138
Dear Karen:
I'm glad you found our paper informative.
As far as I know there are no imaging studies being conducted on non-stutterers who have parents who stutter. We are currently conducting studies on people who recovered after adolescence and eventually on those who recovered in childhood.
Regarding our choice of PET over fMRI. At the time we conducted these studies (mid 90s) no solution had been found to the problem of controlling movement artifacts produced by speech during fMRI conditions -- speech-related movement artifacts are relatively easy to control for in the processing of O15 PET images. More recently, however, with the advent of event-related fMRI and some more sophisticated correction algorithms it has been possible to solve that problem. Indeed, we have recently reported the use of event related fMRI during stuttered and nonstuttered single words. The results are generally consistent with what we've found in our PET studies. The most interesting commonality has been in the temporal lobe where we continue to see deactivation during stuttered words but not during non-stuttered words.