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From: Nan Ratner
Date: 10/6/03
Time: 9:41:10 PM
Remote Name: 152.163.252.164
My own personal favorite is the finding of Anne Smith and colleagues (e.g. Maner, Weber-Fox) that the demands of formulating more sophisticated language can uniquely destabilize the speech motor systems in people who stutter,the first emprirically documented example of a multi-factorial interaction among speech-language abilities that could produce stuttering symptoms. I personally like this because of my own work that shows the significant effect of language demand on stuttering in young children close to stuttering onset (they stutter more on longer, harder, utterances for which their grammar is not as robust). To this, I would add the two recent new studies on brain morphology in people who stutter (Foundas, Sommer et al.) which somewhat helps to interpret the fMRI studies showing atypical cortical organization for language and speech in people who stutter. We keep asking ourselves whether the functional imaging findings reflect the CAUSE of stuttering or merely how people learn to live with stuttering; structural differences make it more likely that SOME of the functional differences contribute to cause, rather than reflect the outcome of living with stuttering. But these are just my personal choices....