Stuttering Reflects Irregularities in Brain Setup

A stutter indicates a massive change in brain wiring that affects more than just speech

Put on a pair of headphones and turn up the volume so that you can’t even hear yourself speak. For those who stutter, this is when the magic happens. Without the ability to hear their own voice, people with this speech impediment no longer stumble over their words—as was recently portrayed in the movie The King’s Speech. This simple trick works because of the unusual way the brain of people who stutter is organized—a neural setup that affects other actions besides speech, according to a new study.

Normal speech requires the brain to control movement of the mouth and vocal chords using the sound of the speaker’s own voice as a guide. This integration of movement and hearing typically happens in the brain’s left hemisphere, in a region of the brain known as the premotor cortex. In those who stutter, however, the process occurs in the right hemisphere—prob­ably because of a slight defect on the left side, according to past brain-imaging studies. Singing requires a similar integration of aural input and motor control, but the processing typically occurs in the right hemi­sphere, which may explain why those who stutter can sing as well as anyone else. (In a related vein, The King’s Speech also mentioned the common belief that people who stutter are often left-handed, but studies have found
no such link.)

In the new study, published in the September issue of Cortex, re­searchers found that the unusual neural organization underlying a stutter also includes motor tasks completely unrelated to speech. A group of 30 adults, half of whom stuttered and half of whom did not, tapped a finger in time to a metronome. When the sci­entists interfered with the function of their left hemisphere using trans­cranial magnetic stimulation, a non­invasive technique that temporarily dampens brain activity, nonstutterers found themselves unable to tap in time—but those who stuttered were unaffected. When the researchers interfered with the right hemisphere, the results were reversed: the stut­tering group was impaired, and the nonstutterers were fine.

According to lead author Martin Sommer, a neuroscientist at the University of Göttingen in Germany,the results suggest that the left-hemisphere defect underlying a stutter causes trouble with sensory integra­tion in general, rather than specifically speech-related problems as was his­torically thought. “Like in stroke pa­tients, the right side seems to jump in and compensate,” Sommer ex­plains. But that part of the brain did not evolve to handle those tasks, so problems—such as a stutter—can emerge.

 

View article on Scientific American here.

By the time he was a senior at Humboldt High School, Larry Pressler had lettered three years in basketball and won honors at the state high school oratory contest.

But he never had received any recognition like the kind he got for winning the state title in the American Legion Oratorical Contest in Pierre in 1960.

The former U.S. senator keeps easily accessible the 5½-inch-long clipping from theArgus Leader that proclaims his victory.

“It was the first time I had gotten such recognition,” Pressler says.

His achievement was all the more remarkable when you learn that Pressler had entered high school a little more than three years earlier tormented by speech impediments.

“I had a very severe stammering and stuttering problem when I was growing up. There were no special speech teachers or speech therapists at our school, although I took speech therapy at the University of South Dakota,” he says.

“My freshman year, it was a stammering more than a stuttering. Not because of a bad childhood; some people are just stutterers or stammerers. We had our high school reunion, and some remembered that I was a shy, stuttering, stammering guy. People were astounded. I’m astounded myself.”

 

Continue reading here.

One minute, 12-year-old Jake Zeldin was in the crowd at a rap concert last Saturday. The next, he’d charmed his way backstage to rap for his idol, Toronto superstar Drake.

And that’s not even the impressive part.

As he talked his way past bouncers at last Saturday’s Tyga concert at Kool Haus, Zeldin’s speech was slowed by the debilitating stutter that has plagued him since he began to speak. But once he won his way back, Zeldin transformed into a quick-talking performer, spitting out rhymes at a frenetic pace without missing a beat.

“I was super excited,” Jake said of the performance, fighting his impediment over the phone. “It was a dream, actually. It didn’t feel real.”

Throughout the rap, caught on video by Zeldin’s 15-year-old brother Cole, Drake grins, nods approvingly, gives him a high-five at the end and exclaims, “That’s what’s up!”

“After, he told me I should keep it up,” said Jake.

Despite thousands spent on speech therapy, nothing has been able to help the Grade 7 student improve his speech. The impediment has made him the butt of jokes and teasing at school — even from teachers.

Continue reading here.

By Karla Villegas Gama, CNN

November 30, 2011

What do Bruce Willis, Winston Churchill, Marilyn Monroe and King George VI have in common besides being public figures? They all suffered from stuttering at some point in their lives.

But what is stuttering and how it does it manifest itself? The Stuttering Foundation of America explains on its website that it is “a communication disorder in which the flow of speech is broken by repetitions, prolongations, or abnormal stoppages of sounds and syllables.”

In February 2010, a group of researchers published a study in the New England Journal of Medicine, which states that the brain cells of people who stutter have three genetic mutations; this causes problems in the cells’ metabolism.

“This process is called the garbage can, or more like the recycling bin, of the cell. When this process gets interrupted, the cell goes haywire, and that causes problems,” the study’s co-author Dennis Drayna told CNN.

According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, 1% of the world’s population, around 68 million people, stutter.

 

Read the entire article here.

By Julia Evangelou Strait

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have obtained new evidence that at least some persistent stuttering is caused by mutations in a gene governing not speech, but a metabolic pathway involved in recycling old cell parts.

Beyond a simple association, the study provides the first evidence that mutations affecting cellular recycling centers called lysosomes actually play a role in causing some people to stutter.

“This was extremely unexpected,” says senior author Stuart A. Kornfeld, MD, the David C. and Betty Farrell Professor of Medicine. “Why would impairment in a lysosomal pathway lead to stuttering? We don’t know the answer to that. Partly because we don’t know very much about the mechanisms of speech, including which neurons in the brain are involved. So we can’t fully explain stuttering, but now we have clues.”

The research is available online in the Journal of Biological Chemistry

Genetic clues to stuttering were first identified in a paper published in theNew England Journal of Medicine in February 2010. In it, Dennis Drayna, PhD, a senior investigator with the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders and a co-author on the current study, and his colleagues reported results of genetic studies on members of a large Pakistani family, many of whom stutter.

Among most of the stuttering family members, they found mutations in three genes involved in directing proteins to the lysosome. These same mutations were present in many unrelated individuals in Pakistan, North America and Europe who stutter, but not in those with normal speech.

 

Read the full story here.

Oregon State football: If the Beavers win, Kevin Frahm will let his teammates give him a buzz cut

…“It’s awesome, because I feel like the only people who expect us to win are the people in this building,’’ said Frahm on a calm-before-the-storm Monday afternoon at the Valley Center.

It was a day off for the players, but Frahm had typically just finished a workout. He doesn’t do many long interviews. He has stuttered since childhood and generally avoids the TV cameras because of it, but when he’s “jacked up’’ the words come easily and during a 45-minute session he got his points across with passion and eloquence.

Frahm said there is “magic’’ in the Civil War game – meaning, anything is possible – and then he disclosed some extra incentive for his teammates if they shock the college football world.

“I told them if we win, I would let them buzz off all my hair,’’ said Frahm, whose notorious long locks, ear-splitting laugh, and occasional lapses into Rex Ryan-type vocabulary on the sidelines are among the staples of every Oregon State practice…

 

Read full article here.

Information provided by Wendy Taormina-Weiss – Published: 2011-11-11

People who stutter want to be able to express their ideas, feelings, thoughts and more as freely as people who do not stutter.

They certainly deserve to have a voice that is heard by others, and a product known as, “SpeechEasy,” presents a potential solution to stuttering. SpeechEasy combines techniques and technologies that are proven and may be used to reduce stuttering while enhancing a person’s fluency.

SpeechEasy is a device; one that mimics the choral effect and pairs it with well-known, traditional fluency techniques, giving a person who stutters the confidence to say what they desire to at the time they want to say it. It is also a tool that assists with ensuring your message is heard. Your ideas and thoughts are no longer hidden from others when you use SpeechEasy. People who use the device find they are more confident in their communication, feeling freer to live their lives.

To look at the SpeechEasy device it seems very similar to a hearing aid.

There is a very real difference between the SpeechEasy and a hearing aid though. Instead of amplifying sound, the device alters sounds that enter it so people who stutter can hear their voice with a slight time delay, as well as at a different pitch. The reason for the delay and change in pitch is to re-create something known as the, “choral effect,” a natural phenomenon.

The choral effect happens when a person’s stutter is greatly reduced or entirely eliminated when they speak or sing along with other people. The choral effect is something that has been well documented over decades of time. The SpeechEasy device uses the choral effect and is a small and wearable device people can use every day.

The device has four different models, giving people the opportunity to choose one that works best for them. The device can be obtained through a SpeechEasy provider who works with people to help them decide which model is the best one for them. The device has a warranty period of a year against any defects in the product. If you decide you don’t like it – no problem; there is a sixty-day trial period. The trial period is there so you can decide if it is working for you.

 

Continue reading here.