postr/StutterJuly 18, 2023

Update.

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Update. We extend our gratitude to each of you for taking part in the Reddit [poll](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stutter/comments/151hxoa/poll_subconscious_fluency_and_stuttering_remission/). Results: Most people voted for: * **#3: research about neurology** * **#4: research about the causes of stuttering** In the spirit of [teamwork](https://www.reddit.com/r/Stutter/comments/14t0946/people_who_stutter_lets_team_up_and_post_links_of/), I will therefore summarize and extract tips from the below research studies. Goal is to find clues regarding: *stuttering recovery* or *remission*. Can we get input from others - like you, to review other research studies from 2022 or 2023? The upcoming weeks I will summarize the following five research studies: * [Research](https://alliedhealth.ceconnection.com/ovidfiles/00011363-202201000-00004.pdf): "*Why Stuttering Occurs: The Role of Cognitive Conflict and Control*". The purpose of this article is to provide a theoretical account of the experience of stuttering that incorporates previous explanations and recent experimental findings. According to this account, stuttering-like disfluencies emerged during early childhood from excessive detection of cognitive conflict due to subtle limitations in speech and language processes. For a subset of children who begin to stutter, the development of approach-avoidance motivational conflict likely contributes to a chronic reliance on cognitive control processes during speech. Consequently, maladaptive activation of right hemisphere inhibitory cortices to the basal ganglia via a hyperdirect pathway results in involuntary, episodic, and transient freezing of the motor system during speech initiation. This freeze response, consistent with defensive behavior in threatening situations, may lead to stuttering persistence, tension and struggle, maladaptive speech physiology, and feelings of anxiety and loss of control. * [Research](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929323000294): "*Brain developmental trajectories associated with childhood stuttering persistence and recovery*". The neural mechanisms underlying persistence and recovery from stuttering remain unclear and little information exists on neurodevelopmental anomalies in children who stutter (CWS) during preschool age, when stuttering symptoms typically first emerge. Here we present findings from the largest longitudinal study of childhood stuttering to date, comparing children with persistent stuttering (pCWS) and those who later recovered from stuttering (rCWS) with age-matched fluent peers. A total of 470 MRI scans were analyzed from 95 CWS (72 pCWS and 23 rCWS) and 95 fluent peers between 3 and 12 years of age. We examined overall group and group by age interactions in GMV and WMV in preschool age (3–5 years old) and school age (6–12 years old) CWS and controls, controlling for sex, IQ, intracranial volume, and socioeconomic status. The results provide broad support for a possible basal ganglia-thalamocortical (BGTC) network deficit starting in the earliest phases of the disorder and point to normalization or compensation of earlier occurring structural changes associated with stuttering recovery. * [Research](https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3425/12/8/1030): "*Reinvestigating the Neural Bases Involved in Speech Production of Stutterers: An ALE Meta-Analysis*". "Many studies have investigated neural activities in stuttering, but the cognitive neural mechanism of stuttering has still not been fully determined. Our analysis revealed overactivation in the bilateral posterior superior temporal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus, medial frontal gyrus, precentral gyrus, postcentral gyrus, basal ganglia, and cerebellum, and deactivation in the anterior superior temporal gyrus and middle temporal gyrus among the stutterers." **Conclusion**: "The overactivated regions might indicate a greater demand in feedforward planning in speech production, while the deactivated regions might indicate dysfunction in the auditory feedback system among stutterers. Based on the directions into velocities of articulators model and state feedback control theory, our findings provided support for the greater demand in the feedforward system in speech production. More importantly, solid evidence was provided for the dysfunction in the auditory feedback system, which might be the crucial cause of stuttering. These findings suggest that abnormal neural underpinnings of PWS were a result of dysfunction in various cortical–subcortical–cerebellar networks." * [Research](https://sstp.nl/article/view/39161/36312): "*8th International Conference on Speech Motor Control Groningen: Abstracts".* *1.* Neural Anatomy & Physiology of Speech Production (Chair: Marina Laganaro) 2. Speech Production Modeling & Action-Perception (Chairs: Susanne Fuchs & PhilHoole) 3. Conditions Affecting Speech Motor Control (Chair: Anja Lowit) 4. (A)typical Speech Motor & Speech Sound Development in Children (Chairs: AudeNoiray & Aravind Namasivayam) * [Research](https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/125332/3/H%EF%BF%BDbler_Fiona_202211_PhD_thesis.pdf): "*Differences in implicit motor learning between adults who do and do not stutter*". Implicit learning allows us to acquire complex motor skills through repeated exposure to sensory cues and repetition of motor behaviours, without awareness or effort. Implicit learning is also critical to the incremental fine-tuning of the perceptual-motor system. To understand how implicit learning and associated domain-general learning processes may contribute to motor learning differences in people who stutter, we investigated implicit finger-sequencing skills in adults who do (AWS) and do not stutter (ANS) on an Alternating Serial Reaction Time task. Our results demonstrated that, while all participants showed evidence of significant sequence-specific learning in their speed of performance, male AWS were slower and made fewer sequence-specific learning gains than their ANS counterparts. Although there were no learning gains evident in accuracy of performance, AWS performed the implicit learning task more accurately than ANS, overall. These findings may have implications for sex-based differences in the experience of developmental stuttering, for the successful acquisition of complex motor skills during development by individuals who stutter, and for the updating and automatization of speech motor plans during the therapeutic process.

Themes

Community & SupportIdentity & DisabilityCauses & Variability

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Research & ResourcesIdentity & Self-PerceptionPropositionality & Weight