But which of these circuits can lead to a stutter? To find out, Guenther pieced together equations that represent how the neurons that form these circuits interact. Hopkin: The on/off switch initiates the movement. To understand the function of these circuits it’s useful to consider something like the energizer bunny which has an on/off switch as well as a set of motors and gears that make the bunny walk and play drums when the switch is turned on. Guenther: One is an initiation circuit and the other is an articulation circuit. But the key drivers can be broken down into two main circuits. Hopkin: Numerous neural circuits come into play when it comes to generating speech. Guenther: Despite this, and despite being studied at least as far back as the ancient Romans, our understanding of what causes stuttering has been until recent years very poor. It’s estimated that about one percent of the world’s population stutters. Hopkin: He says that stuttering is very common and it happens in all languages. into movements of the tongue and the other speech articulators that convey these thoughts to another person. Hopkin: Frank Guenther of Boston University. įrank Guenther: My main research interest is translating how the brain translates thoughts. They presented their findings at the Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America. Now, studying a neurocomputational model of this complex process, researchers have found that stuttering stems from a glitch in the neural circuit that initiates speech. Interruptions anywhere along this articulation pathway can impair the utterance, and create something like a stutter. Then your brain has to tell your mouth to say it. First you have to think of something to say. Hopkin: When you stop to think about it, it’s not all that easy to speak. Karen Hopkin: This is Scientific American’s 60-Second Science.

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