Cortical dynamics of disfluency in adults who stutter

Citation: Sengupta, R., Shah, S., Loucks, T. M. J., Pelczarski, K., Scott Yaruss, J., Gore, K., & Nasir, S. M. (2017). Cortical dynamics of disfluency in adults who stutter. Physiological Reports, 5(9). doi:10.14814/phy2.13194Stuttering is a disorder of speech production whose origins have been traced to the central nervous system. One of the factors that may underlie stuttering is aberrant neural miscommunication within the speech motor network. It is thus argued that disfluency (any interruption in the forward flow of speech) in adults who stutter (AWS) could be associated with anomalous cortical dynamics. Aberrant brain activity has been demonstrated in AWS in the absence of overt disfluency, but recording neural activity during disfluency is more challenging. The paradigm adopted here took an important step that involved overt reading of long and complex speech tokens under continuous EEG recording. Anomalies in cortical dynamics preceding disfluency were assessed by subtracting out neural activity for fluent utterances from their disfluent counterparts. Differences in EEG spectral power involving alpha, beta, and gamma bands, as well as anomalies in phase-coherence involving the gamma band, were observed prior to the production of the disfluent utterances. These findings provide novel evidence for compromised cortical dynamics that directly precede disfluency in AWS. © 2017 The Authors. Physiological Reports published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of The Physiological Society and the American Physiological Society

Filled pauses in Hungarian: Their phonetic form and function

Filled pauses are natural occurrences in spontaneous speech and they may turn up at any level of the speech planning process and in a number of functions. The aim of this paper is to find out whether the diverse functions of filled pauses correlate with diverse articulations resulting in diverse acoustic structures. Spontaneous narratives are used as research material. The duration of the filled pauses and the frequency values of their first two formants are analyzed. The most frequent form, schwa, shows function-dependent realizations as confirmed by the durational values and by the second formant values of these vowel-like sounds

Classification of Types of Stuttering Symptoms Based on Brain Activity

Among the non-fluencies seen in speech, some are more typical (MT) of stuttering speakers, whereas others are less typical (LT) and are common to both stuttering and fluent speakers. No neuroimaging work has evaluated the neural basis for grouping these symptom types. Another long-debated issue is which type (LT, MT) whole-word repetitions (WWR) should be placed in. In this study, a sentence completion task was performed by twenty stuttering patients who were scanned using an event-related design. This task elicited stuttering in these patients. Each stuttered trial from each patient was sorted into the MT or LT types with WWR put aside. Pattern classification was employed to train a patient-specific single trial model to automatically classify each trial as MT or LT using the corresponding fMRI data. This model was then validated by using test data that were independent of the training data. In a subsequent analysis, the classification model, just established, was used to determine which type the WWR should be placed in. The results showed that the LT and the MT could be separated with high accuracy based on their brain activity. The brain regions that made most contribution to the separation of the types were: the left inferior frontal cortex and bilateral precuneus, both of which showed higher activity in the MT than in the LT; and the left putamen and right cerebellum which showed the opposite activity pattern. The results also showed that the brain activity for WWR was more similar to that of the LT and fluent speech than to that of the MT. These findings provide a neurological basis for separating the MT and the LT types, and support the widely-used MT/LT symptom grouping scheme. In addition, WWR play a similar role as the LT, and thus should be placed in the LT type

Perceções dos professores sobre o impacto da gaguez no quotidiano dos seus alunos que gaguejam

Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental disorder involving interruptions in the flow of speech. The reactions of listeners and others in a child's environment could affect how children perceive their stuttering. Children experience many of their everyday social situations in the school context. Because it might be hard for children who stutter to deal with communication in the school setting, it is essential to know how teachers perceive the impact of stuttering on their students. In this study, we collected data about teachers' perceptions of the impact of stuttering on Portuguese children who stutter using an adaptation of the European Portuguese translation of Overall Assessment of the Speaker's Experience of Stuttering (OASES-S-PT). Participants were 27 teachers and their students who stutter (n=27; mean age=9.0 mos., SD=1.8 mos.), recruited from different cities in Portugal. In general, teachers perceived the overall impact of stuttering in their students' lives as mild-to-moderate. Our results did not reveal any statistically significant differences between the teachers' perceptions of the impact of stuttering and the students' self-reports. Still, there was no statistically significant correlation between the students' impact scores and the teachers' impact scores. Teachers were unable to rate several items on the instrument, which indicates that they were unfamiliar with some aspects of the children's experiences with stuttering. This finding highlights the need to integrate teachers into therapy programs to increase support within the environment of for children who stutter.A gaguez é uma perturbação do neurodesenvolvimento que afeta a fluência normal do discurso. A forma como os outros percecionam a gaguez e como reagem à perturbação pode afetar a forma como as próprias crianças percecionam a sua gaguez. As crianças têm grande parte das suas experiências sociais na escola e para as crianças que gaguejam pode ser difícil lidar com a comunicação pelo que torna-se essencial perceber como é que os professores percecionam a gaguez. Neste estudo, recolhemos dados acerca das perceções dos professores acerca do impacto da gaguez nas crianças portuguesas, através de uma adaptação da versão Portuguesa do instrumento: Avaliação Global da Experiência da gaguez pela pessoa (OASES-S). Participaram no estudo 27 professores e os seus alunos que gaguejam (n= 27; média de idade =9.0 anos; DP= 1.8), que foram recrutados de diversas cidades em Portugal. No geral, os professores percecionaram o impacto da gaguez na vida dos seus alunos como: ligeiro-a-moderado. Não se verificaram diferenças estatisticamente significativas entre as perceções dos professores acerca do impacto da gaguez e a auto-perceção dos alunos. Contudo, não se verificou correlação entre as pontuações de impacto dos professores e dos alunos. Além disso, os professores não responderam a alguns dos itens do questionário, o que indica que os professores estão pouco familiarizados com alguns aspetos relacionados com as experiências das crianças e a gaguez, o que enfatiza a necessidade de uma melhor integração dos professores nos programas terapêuticos de forma a aumentar o apoio fornecido em contexto escolar às crianças que gaguejam.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio