Abstract
In the past two decades, neuroimaging investigations of stuttering have led to important
discoveries of structural and functional brain differences in people who stutter,
providing significant clues to the neurological basis of stuttering. One major limitation,
however, has been that most studies so far have only examined adults who stutter,
whose brain and behavior likely would have adopted compensatory reactions to their
stuttering; these confounding factors have made interpretations of the findings difficult.
Developmental stuttering is a neurodevelopmental condition, and like many other neurodevelopmental
disorders, stuttering is associated with an early childhood onset of symptoms and
greater incidence in males relative to females. More recent studies have begun to
examine children who stutter using various neuroimaging techniques that allow examination
of functional neuroanatomy and interaction of major brain areas that differentiate
children who stutter compared with age-matched controls. In this article, I review
these more recent neuroimaging investigations of children who stutter, in the context
of what we know about typical brain development, neuroplasticity, and sex differences
relevant to speech and language development. Although the picture is still far from
complete, these studies have potential to provide information that can be used as
early objective markers, or prognostic indicators, for persistent stuttering in the
future. Furthermore, these studies are the first steps in finding potential neural
targets for novel therapies that may involve modulating neuroplastic growth conducive
to developing and maintaining fluent speech, which can be applied to treatment of
young children who stutter.
Keywords
Childhood developmental stuttering - neuroimaging - MRI - fMRI - DTI
