**What can we learn from this?** An important thing to recognise and remember is that anticipating stuttering or anticipating communication failure is not enough in itself to cause stuttering. Stuttering events tend to occur when in addition to anticipation (of communication failure, or of stuttering, or of negative listener responses) one also negatively evaluates the anticipated outcome. Indeed, the negative evaluations of the anticipated outcome is a much greater contributor to moments of stuttering than the anticipation itself. "AWS, during choral speech, show expected patterns of hyperactivity in premotor/motor regions". In my opinion, this indicates that, during choral speech, Adults Who Stutter (AWS) focus more on motor regions to reduce stuttering. Overall, brain activity differences between AWS relative to controls in the two conditions were similar, showing expected patterns of hyperactivity in premotor/motor regions but underactivity in auditory regions. Also, in the introduction, they made this comment about previous research that has investigated the same thing… "In particular, findings from the neuroimaging literature include overactivation of cortical speech motor regions, particularly in the right hemisphere, but decreased activation in auditory regions, during speech production, both of which become attenuated under fluency induced conditions or following intensive fluency training (⦁ Braun, 1997; ⦁ Stager et al., 2003; ⦁ Brown et al., 2005; Toyomura et al., 2011, ⦁ 2015; Budde et al., 2014)." The phrase “both of which become attenuated under fluency induced conditions or following intensive fluency training” indicates that during choral speech (which is a condition that is known to induce fluency) the overactivation of speech motor regions and the underaction of auditory regions become less pronounced or even disappear entirely. In other words, in choral speech, stutterers’ brains behave in a similar manner to non-stutterers. In other words, the “expected patterns of hyperactivity in the premotor/motor regions” that the authors are referring to are that in previous research PWS have generally been found to have hyperactive premotor/motor regions when speaking alone but not when speaking in chorus. And what the authors are saying here is that they found this same pattern in their research now. This would seem to imply that they listen too much to their own speech during solo reading, but not during choral reading. And this suggests that listening too much to one’s own speech may tend to make one stutter – or stutter more. Yes, it is true that a non-stutterer doesn't focus so much on motor regions, because he has sufficient faith in his bodies automatic (learned) responses – based on past experience, which has demonstrated to him that his automatic motor responses are generally good enough and reliable enough. As for people who (almost) overcame stuttering (think of Joe Biden, John Harisson, Lee Lovett) I would imagine that they probably still focus more on the motor regions to reduce stuttering on the odd occasions when they anticipate that they might stutter. However, do bear in mind that normal speakers (who have never been diagnosed as stutterers) do exactly the same thing in speaking situations where they are not confident that they will articulate their words well enough, such as, for example when trying to pronounce an unfamiliar word in a foreign language. What I’m saying is that overactivation of the speech motor control system and underactivation of the auditory cortex is a normal response in any situation where the speaker is not confident in their automatic ability to say a word or phrase well enough and where they resort to using conscious control instead. So it is not just stutterers who do this, although stutterers do it much more than non-stutterers (because they tend to try to use conscious control more often than non-stutterers. Trying to exert conscious control over the speech motor system (instead of simply relying on automatic learned responses) does not necessarily cause one to stutter. On the contrary, stuttering is most likely to happen when one negatively evaluates one’s performance (or one’s predicted performance). So I would suggest that there is nothing wrong with occasionally trying to exert conscious control over one’s speech motor system – and indeed non-stutterers also do it from time to time, for example when rehearsing for a part in a play in which one has to speak in a different way to how one normally speaks, or when practicing a speech or a song.