Physiological Correlates of Stuttering

描述（由申请人提供）：口吃是一种语言障碍，患病率估计为世界人口的1%。这通常是个人的重大沟通问题，限制了教育和就业机会以及社会和心理适应。口吃的病因是未知的，治疗策略和结果是高度可变的。理解口吃的病因和发展成功的治疗技术的一个主要障碍是缺乏对这种障碍的生理基础的理解。口吃表现为言语运动过程的中断。已知的影响口吃发生的复杂因素最终一定会对语言产生所必需的生理事件产生影响。在了解成人口吃的生理基础方面已经取得了重大进展。然而，口吃是一种发育障碍，平均发病年龄为3岁。几乎没有关于幼儿口吃的生理学研究来帮助我们理解这种疾病的病因。在我们关于口吃的理论框架中，我们假设运动、语言、认知、社会心理和遗传因素在口吃的发生和发展中发挥作用。此外，这些因素的影响很可能在口吃者的一生中发生变化。我们选择将这个项目主要集中在运动和语言因素及其在学龄前口吃儿童和正常流利的同龄人中的潜在相互作用上。我们假设，当儿童无法获得稳定的运动控制和语言协调过程时，口吃就会出现，从而使他或她在面对增加的处理需求时容易崩溃。我们测试了一个假设，即口吃儿童在发展语言运动控制和协调过程方面落后于正常流利的同龄人。此外，我们评估口吃儿童的言语运动系统是否对增加的语言处理需求异常敏感。我们试图确定，在口吃成人的大脑活动中检测到的语言处理差异，在口吃的早期是否也很明显。通过采用纵向实验设计，我们可以确定一系列与语言和运动功能相关的生理测量是否可以区分持续口吃的儿童和恢复口吃的儿童。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Stuttering is a disorder of speech with a prevalence estimated to be 1% of the world's population. It is often a significant communicative problem for the individual, limiting educational and employment opportunities and social and psychological adjustment. The etiology of stuttering is unknown, and treatment strategies and outcomes are highly variable. A major impediment to understanding the etiology of stuttering and to the development of successful therapeutic techniques is the lack of understanding of the physiological bases of the disorder. Stuttering manifests itself as a breakdown in speech motor processes. The complex factors known to affect the occurrence of stuttering must ultimately have an effect on the physiological events necessary for the production of speech. There has been significant progress in understanding the physiological bases of stuttering in adults. Stuttering, however, is a developmental disorder with an average age of onset of 3-years. There is almost no work on the physiology of stuttering in young children to help us understand the etiology of the disorder. In our theoretical framework on stuttering, we posit that motor, linguistic, cognitive, psychosocial, and genetic factors play a role in the onset and development of stuttering. Further it seems likely that the influence of these factors changes over the lifespan of the individual who stutters. We elect to focus this project primarily on motor and linguistic factors and their potential interactions in preschool children who are stuttering and their normally fluent peers. We hypothesize that stuttering emerges when a child fails to acquire stable motor control and coordination processes for speech, thus making him or her vulnerable to breakdown in the face of increased processing demands. We test the hypothesis that children who stutter lag their normally fluent peers in developing speech motor control and coordination processes. Furthermore, we assess whether the speech motor systems of children who stutter are exceptionally sensitive to increased linguistic processing demands. We seek to determine if language processing differences detected in the brain activity of adults who stutter are also evident in the early years of stuttering. By employing a longitudinal experimental design, we can determine whether a set of physiological measures related to language and motor functions can discriminate children who will persist in stuttering from those who will recover.