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Research proving that stuttering is located in pre-motor brain by Ingham, Fox, et al

From: Gunars
Date: 10/11/00
Time: 5:42:49 PM
Remote Name: 12.13.226.14

Comments

Y'all,

In October 3, 2000 issue of ASHA Leader Ellen Uffen wrote an article titled "Research Confirms Pre-Motor Brain Location for Stuttering". It is about a research report to be published in Brain and Language "Is Overt Stuttering a Prerequisite for the Neural Activations Associated With Chronic Developmental Stuttering?" by Ingham, Fox et al. This replicative study using positron emission tomography (PET) established that "...the brain regions that were activated and deactivated during stuttered speech were the same as those activated when the participants simply imagined they were stuttering." "This work put into doubt the common belief that stuttering is essentially a speech-motor disorder."

My questions to you are:

1) Isn't this a marvelous breakthough!?! Finally we can start to trace something physical as to what happens during stuttering inside the nervous system!!

2) Should we not now try to find a marker indicator from polygraph, biofeedback, or brainwave measurements which would track the activity in the given specific area of the brain so that we can develop a cheaper measurement apparatus to scientifically study stuttering?

3) Would not this type of apparatus be useful to study covert stuttering?

4) Could we not then prove or disprove the effectiveness of certain cognitive psychology techniques?

5) Doesn't this give us a window to possibly objectively measure the attitudes and emotions during stuttering including anxiety, shame, and guilt?

6) Borrowing a page from sports psychology will we not now be able to find out if we are in a "Zone", a mind set where we can talk flowingly?

7) Could not these types of measurements be used to discriminate children who have normal dysfluencies from those who are at risk of developing chronic stuttering?

8) As for the results of stuttering therapy, we might discover which stuttering therapies actually deal with the root cause and which ones just superimpose a discipline in the motor area of the brain to override the stuttering causing stimuli?

9) Above all can't we now start to build models of what makes a person be fluent and what causes him to stutter in a given situations? Although we might yet be very far in establishing what processes take place during stuttering onset, aren't we, with this seminal paper, a lot closer to finding out what propagates stuttering?

I, personally, have not been as excited about any research in stuttering as about this. This is a study that replicates the early findings (see P.T. Fox et al, 1996, "A PET study of the neural systems of stuttering," Nature, 382, 158-162)!!

Gunars


Last changed: September 12, 2005