WEDNESDAY, July 28, 2004 (HealthDayNews) -- Even when people who stutter aren't speaking, their brains process language differently than other people, say Purdue University researchers.
In a series of studies, the scientists measured brain activity of adults who stutter and those who don't as they responded silently, by pressing a button, to questions about sentence meaning, grammar, and rhyming.
"Traditionally, stuttering is thought of as a problem with how someone speaks, and little attention has been given to the complex interactions between neurological systems that underlie speaking," researcher Christine Weber-Fox, an assistant professor of speech sciences, said in a prepared statement.
"We have found differences in adults who stutter, compared to those who don't, in how the brain processes information when people are thinking about language but not speaking. For example, there was a significant delay in response time when subjects were given a complex language task. We also found that in people who stutter, certain areas of the brain are more active when processing some language tasks," Weber-Fox said.
"Adults who stutter often have great language skills, meaning they don't have problems with rules of grammar or with the sounds we use to code the words of our language. When they speak, however, their motor output falters, so they pause or trip over words. We wanted to evaluate the brain activity when they were not stuttering and, in fact, when they were not having to engage their speech motor systems," she said.
The findings were presented July 23 at a meeting of the American Speech-Language Hearing Association in Portland, Ore. The results will also appear in the August issue of the Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research.
More information
The Nemours Foundation has information about stuttering in children.
