Tuesday, September 25, 2018

CLOSED: Please participate in this survey!

Anastasia Sares, PhD Candidate at the Centre for Research on Brain, Language and Music (crblm.ca), asked me if I could put up her call for volunteers! Please support her research!

We are conducting a project with Haskins Laboratories and McGill University, researching the music and language habits of people who stutter. The study is in the form of an online survey, and we would greatly appreciate your time to fill it out. At the end of the survey, there is an accompanying music perception test. Thank you!"

P.S: The survey is closed now. Thanks for participating!

Friday, July 13, 2018

BREAKING NEWS: John Steggles is Stuttering Jack.


I am at the IFA/ISA/ICA conference!

Finally we met. The two behind the world-wide most read Internet blogs TheStutteringBrain and StutteringJack. We reached millions to increase understanding of stuttering and debate treatments and science!

After years of mystery, I can reveal that StutteringJack is John Steggles from Australia!

Wednesday, June 06, 2018

Help researchers in their research!

"The vast majority of research on stuttering has focused on the observations and perceptions of listeners. We hope to change that by gathering information directly from people who stutter. The Spartan Stuttering Lab at Michigan State University has started a series of surveys about the experiences of people who stutter. We need your help to learn more about what it is like to live with stuttering. "

Find more information at: http://surveys.stutteringcenter.org.

Friday, May 18, 2018

Participate in a study on the experiences of people who stutter

Professor Yaruss asks for volunteers for a new research project from the Michigan State University Spartan Stuttering Lab that he and his doctoral candidate Seth Tichenor are conducting.

Information about the study, as well as a link to the consent form and the survey itself, can be found at: http://Surveys.StutteringCenter.Org.

The primary aim of the project is to learn more about the experiences of people who stutter. As you know, the vast majority of research on stuttering is based on listener observations and perceptions (including, for example, listener judgements of when stuttering has occurred, how fluent a person is, when someone is considered “recovered,” etc.). We hope to explore the validity of these judgements by gaining more information about what people who actually stutter think, feel, and experience about their stuttering.

...We hope to learn about the perspectives of a wide range of individuals who stutter around the world, including people who consider themselves to be recovered and people who have participated in variety of treatment approaches, including less traditional treatments. We are particularly interested in reaching people who are not presently involved in speech therapy or support, because their voices have been even more greatly underrepresented in the existing literature.


Tuesday, February 06, 2018

I will be at the IFA congress in Hiroshima Mid July!


Do I have Japanese readers or readers that live in Japan???

I hope so. Please get in contact with me! I have lots of questions!

I will be at the IFA world congress in Hiroshima from July 13th to 16th and hopefully also hosting some events in my role as chair of the IFA research and publication committee.

Here is the link to congress page.

Monday, February 05, 2018

A new treatment method for adult stuttering?

The well-known Brain science journal has a paper by the Watkins research team in Oxford, where they claim: "transcranial direct current stimulation combined with behavioural fluency intervention can improve fluency in adults who stutter. Transcranial direct current stimulation thereby offers a potentially useful adjunct to future speech therapy interventions for this population, for whom fluency therapy outcomes are currently limited."

ABSTRACT: Chesters J, Möttönen R, Watkins KE

Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental condition affecting 5% of children, and persisting in 1% of adults. Promoting lasting fluency improvement in adults who stutter is a particular challenge. Novel interventions to improve outcomes are of value, therefore. Previous work in patients with acquired motor and language disorders reported enhanced benefits of behavioural therapies when paired with transcranial direct current stimulation. Here, we report the results of the first trial investigating whether transcranial direct current stimulation can improve speech fluency in adults who stutter. We predicted that applying anodal stimulation to the left inferior frontal cortex during speech production with temporary fluency inducers would result in longer-lasting fluency improvements. Thirty male adults who stutter completed a randomized, double-blind, controlled trial of anodal transcranial direct current stimulation over left inferior frontal cortex. Fifteen participants received 20 min of 1-mA stimulation on five consecutive days while speech fluency was temporarily induced using choral and metronome-timed speech. The other 15 participants received the same speech fluency intervention with sham stimulation. Speech fluency during reading and conversation was assessed at baseline, before and after the stimulation on each day of the 5-day intervention, and at 1 and 6 weeks after the end of the intervention. Anodal stimulation combined with speech fluency training significantly reduced the percentage of disfluent speech measured 1 week after the intervention compared with fluency intervention alone. At 6 weeks after the intervention, this improvement was maintained during reading but not during conversation. Outcome scores at both post-intervention time points on a clinical assessment tool (the Stuttering Severity Instrument, version 4) also showed significant improvement in the group receiving transcranial direct current stimulation compared with the sham group, in whom fluency was unchanged from baseline. We conclude that transcranial direct current stimulation combined with behavioural fluency intervention can improve fluency in adults who stutter. Transcranial direct current stimulation thereby offers a potentially useful adjunct to future speech therapy interventions for this population, for whom fluency therapy outcomes are currently limited.