Stammering is epigenetic and other factors influence the degree to which stammering is expressed. There are subtle structural and functional differences in the brain which has been shown in children who stammer as young as three years of age. Genetics is likely to contribute to these differences in brain structure and function associated with stammering.
Adults who stammer have been shown to have less efficient speech motor skills and this is thought to be a contributing factor. One hypothesis is that this is that children who stammer also have less efficient and possibly less stable speech motor patterns that children who do not stammer. Research in this area is ongoing. If speech-motor capacity is a factor then this explains why speaking rapidly exacerbates stammering and why instinctively parents often want to tell their child to slow down.
Stammering emerges at a time of rapid language expansion from single word to multiword utterances. This may result in an increased load in terms of language and speech motor planning that the developing child is unable to accommodate.
Stammering is not caused by being bi or multilingual. Advice to parents of bilingual or multilingual children is to continue to speak to them in the language that they would naturally wish to. Stammering is not caused by anxiety but children can become more anxious due to their experience of stammering if they receive negative reactions to it.
Measurement of risk for anxiety or other emotional vulnerabilities is recommended as part of an assessment by a specialist speech and language therapist. Some research has found that some young children who stammer are more emotionally reactive and less able to regulate their emotions than children who do not stammer. Children, young people and adults are likely to stammer more when under time or performance pressure. Oral exams are often challenging for young people and support for special consideration for oral exams should be given.
Stammering is a neuro-developmental issue which is largely, but not entirely genetically linked. Parents do not cause stammering. Stammering is epigenetic and various other factors influence the degree to which a genetic vulnerability is expressed.
These factors include: language skills, temperament and environmental factors. Sometimes you just need someone to talk to. Though those people and many others, including Maguire, have achieved career success, stuttering can contribute to social anxiety and draw ridicule or discrimination by others. Maguire has been treating people who stutter, and researching potential treatments, for decades. He receives daily emails from people who want to try medications, join his trials, or even donate their brains to his university when they die.
Others, meanwhile, are delving into the root causes of stuttering, which may also point to novel treatments. In the past, many therapists mistakenly attributed stuttering to a number of causes, such as defects of the tongue and voice box, anxiety, trauma or even poor parenting — and some still do.
Yet according to J. Scott Yaruss, a speech-language pathologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing, others have long suspected that neurological problems might underlie stuttering. The first data to back up that hunch came in , he says, when researchers reported altered blood flow in the brains of people who stuttered.
Over the past two decades, continuing research has made it more apparent that stuttering is all in the brain. The actress Emily Blunt has spoken publically about overcoming her own stutter and how it helped her in her acting career Credit: Disney.
Geneticists are identifying variations in certain genes that predispose a person to stutter, but the genes themselves are puzzling: only recently have their links to brain anatomy become apparent. Maguire, meanwhile, is pursuing treatments based on dopamine, a chemical messenger in the brain that helps to regulate emotions and movement precise muscle movements, of course, are needed for intelligible speech.
Scientists are just beginning to braid these disparate threads together, even as they forge ahead with early testing for treatments based on their discoveries. Chang has also observed structural differences in the corpus callosum, the big bundle of nerve fibres that links the left and right hemispheres of the brain. These findings hint that stuttering might result from slight delays in communication between parts of the brain.
Speech, Chang suggests, would be particularly susceptible to such delays because it must be coordinated at lightning speed. Stuttering typically begins when children first start stringing words together into simple sentences, around the age of two. Chang studies children for up to four years, starting as early as possible, looking for changing patterns in brain scans.
The team has embellished the scanner with decorations that hide all the scary parts. In children who stutter, the default mode network seems to insert itself — like a third person butting in on a romantic date — into the conversation between networks responsible for focusing attention and creating movements.
That could also slow speech production, she says. My father was a chief. He had three wives and I have 21 full and half siblings. Drayna, who worked at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, already had a longstanding interest in the inheritance of stuttering. His uncle and elder brother stuttered and his twin sons did so as children. He mentioned the email to current National Institutes of Health director Francis Collins who was director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at that time , who encouraged him to check it out, so he booked a ticket to Africa.
For people who stutter, the observable disfluencies are not the most important part of the condition. Instead, it is the impact on their lives that causes the most concern. These are just a few facts about stuttering. Stuttering usually begins in childhood, between the ages of 2 and 5 years. Stuttering can begin gradually and develop over time, or it can appear suddenly.
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