You bring up an interesting point! I agree completely. Perhaps in high school we tend to be more hyperactive, and as we reach our 30s or 40s, we generally diminish this hyperactivity component and we are able to ignore unimportant stimuli more often, whereas **the attention** in teenagers likely continues to be orientated towards every little stimulus (such as negative reactions that they may perceive as "*stuttering is bad and to be avoided*") they encounter in their environment, which increases their perception (or anticipation) of communication failure, leading to phasic reductions in synaptic dopamine and a rise of the release threshold, resulting in more stuttering-like disfluencies