A new study shows that just thinking about language is enough to trigger a chain of reactions in the mind of a person who stutters, which is different from the one that arises in the mind of a person who does not stutter
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A new study shows that just thinking about language is enough to trigger a chain of reactions in the mind of a person who stutters, which is different from the one that arises in the mind of a person who does not stutter.
The study, led by Dr. Christine Weber-Fox of Purdue University in Indiana, was presented last week at a conference of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association. According to the researchers' findings, stutterers seem to process language differently even while silently solving verbal problems.
The authors of the study believe that stuttering is the result of a complex array of problems. Although the most obvious problem is related to the motor skills of the mouth, the researchers wanted to see what would happen if these skills were taken out of the experiment.
11 adults who stutter and 11 who do not stutter participated in the study. The participants were given a series of verbal tasks, which they were asked to perform without speaking. Participants in the experiment, who used computers, were asked if two given words rhymed with each other. Sometimes the answer was clear: the words rhymed and were similar to each other ("apple" and "muff"), or they were not similar at all and did not rhyme ("cake" and "apple"). However, when the situation was less clear, the stutterers used other parts of their brain - mainly the right side - and it took them longer to solve the problem. "The most difficult problems were those where the words looked similar, like 'board' and 'brain,' but did not rhyme with each other," said Dr. Weber-Fox.
The researchers said that 5% of the population suffers from stuttering at some point in their lives. According to them, the research shows that part of the problem may occur when the mind of a person who stutters is flooded with information. According to them, previous studies on the subject show that the brains of people who stutter react differently even when they listen to the words without reading them.
New York Times, Haaretz, News and Walla!
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