Dysfluency

Discovering developmental stuttering's biological explanation has been an enduring concern. Novel advances in genomics and neuroscience are making it possible to isolate and pinpoint genetic and brain differences implicated in stuttering. This is giving rise to a hope that, in the future, dysfluency could be better managed if stuttering's biological basis could be better understood. Concurrent to this, there is another hope rising: a hope of a future where differing fluencies would not be viewed through a reductive lens of biology and associated pathologies...

Linguistic phenotypes of individuals with Fragile X (FXS) and Williams (WS) syndromes exhibit various degrees of pragmatic impairment, involving difficulties in social communication and in adapting to conversational principles. The goal of the present study was to explore syndrome-specific pragmatic profiles of adults with FXS and WS based on the assessment of the observance of Gricean maxims of conversation. The participants were 12 Spanish-speaking adults (6 FXS/6 WS), without a diagnosis of ASD, whose extensive naturalistic conversations (71,859 words) were transcribed and coded with the CHILDES/TALKBANK tools and the PREP-CORP pragmatic protocol...

Drug-induced stuttering (DIS) is a type of neurogenic stuttering (NS). Although DIS has not been reported as frequently as other cases of NS in the literature, it is not a negligible adverse drug reaction (ADR) which can significantly affect the quality of life if not treated. This literature review aims to evaluate the epidemiological and clinical characteristics of DIS and suggests some pathophysiological mechanisms for this ADR. Relevant English-language reports in Google Scholar, PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus were identified and assessed without time restriction...

Language impairments are frequent, severe, and of prognostic value in autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Unfortunately, the evaluation of the efficacy of treatments targeting the language skills of those with ASD continues to be hindered by a lack of psychometrically sound outcome measures. Expressive Language Sampling (ELS) procedures offer a promising alternative to norm-referenced standardized tests for assessing expressive language in treatment studies. Until now, however, research on the validity and utility of ELS as outcome measures has been limited to administrations by a trained professional in a clinic setting and to use with English-speaking families...

The presented paper introduces principal component analysis application for dimensionality reduction of variables describing speech signal and applicability of obtained results for the disturbed and fluent speech recognition process. A set of fluent speech signals and three speech disturbances-blocks before words starting with plosives, syllable repetitions, and sound-initial prolongations-was transformed using principal component analysis. The result was a model containing four principal components describing analysed utterances...

OBJECTIVES: To explore the benefits of invoking unconscious sentiment to improve the treatment of stuttering and misarticulation. METHODS: This cross-sectional study of 80 participants with speech issues (44 patients with misarticulation and 36 with stuttering) who underwent comprehensive speech and hearing evaluations to confirm and diagnose speech difficulties. Speech and language pathologists then calculated either the percentage of correctly pronounce sounds in misarticulation cases or stuttering severity index-4 scores in cases of stuttering following the use of therapeutic stimuli recorded with familiar and non-familiar voices of similar linguistic and phonetic complexity...

Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental speech disorder characterized by the symptoms of speech repetition, prolongation, and blocking. Stuttering-related dysfluency can be transiently alleviated by providing an external timing signal such as a metronome or the voice of another person. Therefore, the existence of a core motor timing deficit in stuttering has been speculated. If this is the case, then motoric behaviors other than speech should be disrupted in stuttering. This study examined motoric performance on four complex bimanual tasks in 37 adults who stutter and 31 fluent controls...

Developmental stuttering (DS) is a disturbance of the normal rhythm of speech that may be interpreted as very debilitating in the most affected cases. Interventions for DS are historically based on the behavioral modifications of speech patterns (e.g., through speech therapy), which are useful to regain a better speech fluency. However, a great variability in intervention outcomes is normally observed, and no definitive evidence is currently available to resolve stuttering, especially in the case of its persistence in adulthood...

Introduction: Speech dysfluency, often referred to as stuttering, is a frequent speech disorder encountered in about 5% of children. Although in the majority of people affected, symptoms improve in adulthood, in some patients, stuttering persists and significantly impairs everyday functioning and quality of life. Treatment for stuttering includes speech therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and relaxation techniques. However, a substantial number of patients do not benefit sufficiently from these treatment strategies or are even treatment resistant...

Communication problems (eg, dysphonia, dysfluency and language and articulation disorders), swallowing disorders (dysphagia and globus), cough and upper airway symptoms, resulting from functional neurological disorder (FND), are commonly encountered by speech and language professionals. However, there are few descriptions in the literature of the most effective practical management approaches. This consensus document aims to provide recommendations for assessment and intervention that are relevant to both adults and young people...

PURPOSE: In persons living with aphasia, we will explore the relationship between iconic gesture production during spontaneous speech and discourse task, spoken language, and demographic information. METHOD: Employing the AphasiaBank database, we coded iconic gestures in 75 speakers with aphasia during two spoken discourse tasks: a procedural narrative, which involved participants telling the experimenter how to make a sandwich ("Sandwich"), and a picture sequence narrative, which had participants describe the picture sequence to the experimenter ("Window")...

PURPOSE: The current study examines how speech disfluencies manifest themselves in the two languages of bilingual persons who stutter, starting from the hypothesis that stuttering is associated with an attentional deficit at the level of speech production. METHODS: Twenty-eight bilingual people who stutter performed a spontaneous and a controlled speech production task, once in their dominant and once in their non-dominant language. The controlled production task (i...

PURPOSE: The purpose of this study was to examine dysfluency characteristics of individuals with Parkinson Disease (PD) relative to linguistic features of grammatical class and position within word. Few studies have reported dysfluency characteristics of PD relative to these characteristics. Those that do report on these characteristics include one case study and a study of six individuals with PD. No previous research is known to have examined dysfluency related to grammatical class and position within words for a large sample of individuals with PD...

INTRODUCTION: The adaptation effect refers to the gradual reduction of dysfluencies with repeated exposure to a substance. The concept of adaptation was originally defined in light of the reading task. Yet, limited studies have also confirmed the adaptation effect in spontaneous-speech. The reduction in the dysfluencies can be attributed to the reduction in the anxiety, or getting habituated to the content of reading material or due to motor learning. METHODS: This research aimed at measuring the adaptation effect in real and virtual reality (VR) environments for spontaneous-speech and reading...

PURPOSE: Bilingual(s) who stutter (BWS) provide an opportunity to explore the link between stuttering and language. Unlike in monolinguals, stuttering in bilinguals could be influenced by both speaker-related language (e.gs. dominance & proficiency) and linguistic typology-related factors (e.g., structure of languages). However, the available literature is largely inconclusive on these factors. In this context, we systematically reviewed the literature to compile evidence on the influence of such factors on BWS...

Individuals with a premutation of the fragile X mental retardation (FMR1) gene are at risk for a variety of psychological, physical, and cognitive issues, including difficulty with word retrieval. The present study examined three indicators of word retrieval difficulty; reduced productivity, reduced lexical diversity, and increased errors in word retrieval in a group of 38 female premutation carriers during standard-length speech samples collected over a period of eight years. Our results revealed that as women aged, they produced fewer words, produced fewer different words, and had greater word retrieval errors...

PURPOSE: We examined the quality and readability of English-language Internet information about stuttering and evaluated the results considering recommendations by experts in health literacy. METHOD: A search of Internet websites containing information about stuttering was conducted. Three key words (i.e., stuttering, stammering, speech disfluency) were entered into five country-specific versions of the most commonly used Internet search engine. A total of 79 websites were assessed...

We report on a complex dynamic systems study of an untutored adult French learner's development of English syntax, specifically two non-finite adverbial constructions. The study was conducted over one academic year of 30 weeks. From an analysis of L2 speech samples collected weekly, certain patterns in the flux emerged. The learner's ensuing second language development is characterized by a series of bifurcations, stemming from forms competing for the same functional terrain. Each bifurcation is accompanied by turbulence as the system moves from one attractor state to another...

Spasmodic dysphonia (SD) is a rare focal laryngeal dystonia. It is characterized by task-specific voice dysfluency resulting from selective intrinsic laryngeal musculature hyperfunction. Symptoms may be attenuated by a sensory trick. Although SD can be seen at times in generalized dystonia syndromes, it is typically a sporadic phenomenon. Involvement of the laryngeal adductor muscles is more common than abductor muscles. The standard treatment of this disorder is with botulinum toxin injection, usually electromyography-guided, which must be repeated periodically as the toxin wears off...

Background: Stammering is a dysfluency disorder that is common in children exposed to stressful conditions. Displacement from home is one such situation. There is a large internally displaced population in Pakistan. Aims: To determine the prevalence of stammering among children of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in North Waziristan Agency, Pakistan. Methods: This cross-sectional survey included 400 Pushto-speaking children of IDPs, aged 5-18 years enrolled from schools in North Waziristan Agency, from July 2017 to July 2018...