The way that I understand it is: The root cause of developmental stuttering lies in genetic and neurological factors, which can negatively impact tonic dopamine levels.. and this then results in a destabilized speech motor system. Making it more vulnerable to disruptions. While stimuli or cues (like, saying our own name) do not directly cause stuttering, they can exacerbate or trigger stuttering. This occurs due to the role of phasic dopamine, which regulates the moment-to-moment dynamics of motor execution during speech. I think is very relevant to stuttering and in particular to why people who stutter so often relapse after speech therapy. Anyway, this recent development has been proposed by Professor Wolfram Schultz at Cambridge.. Think Incentive learning theory. now, thanks to advances in brain imaging, we now know the chemical basis of experiences of reward and punishment… namely phasic increases and decreases in synaptic (aka “extra-cellular”) dopamine. On important thing to notice here is, that “neutral stimuli” are never completely neutral. On the contrary, neutral stimuli are actually all mildly rewarding. To understand this, when we are born, most of the stimuli that we encounter are neutral – and they remain so until they become paired with a primary rewarding stimulus (like food, warmth, or social contact) or with a primary punishing stimulus (like pain, or social rejection). A response that has been observed in animals, that is almost universal … it is known as the orienting response. The most straightforward example of the orienting response is when animals hear an unexpected noise… on hearing the noise, they suddenly turn their heads towards the source of the noise… i.e., the “orient” themselves towards the unexpected stimulus. This orienting response is very rapid, taking only a few milliseconds. Schultz proposed that it enables animals to focus their attention on the novel stimulus in order to assess whether or not it is likely to be dangerous. The orienting response is accompanied by a phasic release of synaptic dopamine – which enables the motor execution of muscle movements required for approach behaviour. So novel stimuli are initially attractive, and the animal naturally approaches them. The phasic release of dopamine that results from novel stimuli facilitates motor execution and enables the animals to approach the novel stimulus. This accounts for the naïve curiosity that one sees so plainly in kittens and indeed also in young children. This approach behaviour (causing movement towards novel stimuli) continues until one of two possible things happen… (1) the animal or child is distracted by a different novel stimulus and starts to approach it instead, or (2) the novel stimulus turns out to be punishing in some way or other (e.g., it might taste bad, or it might cause pain or make a loud noise etc.). If neither of these 2 things happen, the animal will continue to explore (and maybe eat) the novel stimulus. This orienting and approach behaviour accounts for the initial curiosity of young animals and it enables us to explore our environments and discover which stimuli are rewarding and which are punishing. Novel stimuli only stimulate a phasic release of dopamine (and thus enable orienting and approach behaviour) for a temporary time. If, during that time, they fail to provide some sort of reward, they lose the ability to stimulate a phasic release of dopamine and from that time onwards they no longer stimulate approach behaviour. Instead they become boring – and yes, then one might consider them to have become 'neutral'. This is just my own take on it