Effectiveness of Stuttering Modification Treatment in School-Age Children Who Stutter: A Randomized Clinical Trial.

Purpose: This study investigated the effectiveness of the stuttering modification intervention Kinder Dürfen Stottern (KIDS) in school-age children who stutter.

Method: Seventy-three children who stutter were included in this multicenter, two-group parallel, randomized, wait-list controlled trial with a follow-up of 12 months. Children aged 7-11 years were recruited from 34 centers for speech therapy and randomized to either the immediate-treatment group or the 3 months delayed-treatment group.

White matter tract strength correlates with therapy outcome in persistent developmental stuttering.

Persistent stuttering is a prevalent neurodevelopmental speech disorder, which presents with involuntary speech blocks, sound and syllable repetitions, and sound prolongations. Affected individuals often struggle with negative feelings, elevated anxiety, and low self-esteem. Neuroimaging studies frequently link persistent stuttering with cortical alterations and dysfunctional cortico-basal ganglia-thalamocortical loops; dMRI data also point toward connectivity changes of the superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF) and the frontal aslant tract (FAT).

Fluency shaping increases integration of the command-to-execution and the auditory-to-motor pathways in persistent developmental stuttering.

Fluency-shaping enhances the speech fluency of persons who stutter, yet underlying conditions and neuroplasticity-related mechanisms are largely unknown. While speech production-related brain activity in stuttering is well studied, it is unclear whether therapy repairs networks of altered sensorimotor integration, imprecise neural timing and sequencing, faulty error monitoring, or insufficient speech planning. Here, we tested the impact of one-year fluency-shaping therapy on resting-state fMRI connectivity within sets of brain regions subserving these speech functions.

Two cortical representations of voice control are differentially involved in speech fluency.

Recent studies have identified two distinct cortical representations of voice control in humans, the ventral and the dorsal laryngeal motor cortex. Strikingly, while persistent developmental stuttering has been linked to a white-matter deficit in the ventral laryngeal motor cortex, intensive fluency-shaping intervention modulated the functional connectivity of the dorsal laryngeal motor cortical network. Currently, it is unknown whether the underlying structural network organization of these two laryngeal representations is distinct or differently shaped by stuttering intervention.

Determinants of Concurrent Motor and Language Recovery during Intensive Therapy in Chronic Stroke Patients: Four Single-Case Studies.

Despite intensive research on mechanisms of recovery of function after stroke, surprisingly little is known about determinants of concurrent recovery of language and motor functions in single patients. The alternative hypotheses are that the two functions might either "fight for resources" or use the same mechanisms in the recovery process. Here, we present follow-up data of four exemplary patients with different base levels of motor and language abilities.

Bi-frontal transcranial alternating current stimulation in the ripple range reduced overnight forgetting.

High frequency oscillations in the hippocampal structures recorded during sleep have been proved to be essential for long-term episodic memory consolidation in both animals and in humans. The aim of this study was to test if transcranial Alternating Current Stimulation (tACS) of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in the hippocampal ripple range, applied bi-frontally during encoding, could modulate declarative memory performance, measured immediately after encoding, and after a night's sleep. An associative word-pair learning test was used.