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From: Henny Bijleveld
Date: 10/11/01
Time: 2:08:36 AM
Remote Name: 164.15.7.112
Thank you for your questions and comments. I think , but this is again a personnal approach, that we will learn a lot about the "making of" of stuttering, when we will be able to view the brain activity (with MRI) when someone is going to speak and then is effectively speaking . We now know that the cortical brain activity of stutterers is different from non-stutterers, as to the frontal and parietal lobes. In general, stutterers have a high amount of frontal activity when they are speaking and when they are stuttering. This is probably so because the "Broca center", responsable for the efective production of speech, is under high demands. And this is probably so, because the stutterer know that he/she has problems with the speech output, so all the concentration of the speech act, is laid on the speech production. A high activity in this region is the consequence of this high attention. On the other hand, the parietal lobe, that intervenes (acts) when we have to organize our thoughts in sentences, is less activated in stutteres than in non-stutters. This is a consequence of what I just said. When we listen to a stutter, we are often stroken by the "broken sentences", by "interjections", by "not well structured sentences". I think that this is the consequence of the low activity of the parietal lobe, in contrast to(for the benefit of?)the frontal lobe. This is why linguistically based therapy (take the time to construct your sentence, start with short sentences, only speak short sentences, and the advice given to parents to speak in a simple manner, with short sentences, is often successful. There is a lot of studies on MRI between stutterers and non stutters, that all go in this direction,(if this interest you, I made a study on this topic for my PhD thesis), but there is not one study based on the comparison of speech output between developmental stutterers and neurogenic stutters . And only when we can (could) afford this sort of studies: compare telling a story, conversation, automatic series, comment on pictures, etc. between developmental and neurogenic stutteres, we can (could) see if the brain activity is similar or different.... I dream of doing this, but in Belgium the money for this sort of research is hard to find. Anyhow, I go on studying the problem in research and in therapy, because you need therapy to test your hypothesis. Every client can put your ideas on stuttering to nothing (if this is correct to say). And every new client is a new adventure... Please give me your thoughts about this. I will be very glad to hear and learn from you.If you know neurogenic stutterers, please let me know. Henny Bijleveld