Social anxiety disorder in adolescents who stutter: A risk for school refusal.

Background: Stuttering is a childhood-onset fluency disorder. Part of the counseling for middle and high school students with persistent stuttering is related to school refusal. Anxiety disorders are known to contribute to school refusal.

Abnormal auditory synchronization in stuttering: A magnetoencephalographic study.

In a previous magnetoencephalographic study, we showed both functional and structural reorganization of the right auditory cortex and impaired left auditory cortex function in people who stutter (PWS). In the present work, we reevaluated the same dataset to further investigate how the right and left auditory cortices interact to compensate for stuttering. We evaluated bilateral N100m latencies as well as indices of local and inter-hemispheric phase synchronization of the auditory cortices.

Spatiotemporal signatures of an abnormal auditory system in stuttering.

People who stutter (PWS) can reduce their stuttering rates under masking noise and altered auditory feedback; such a response can be attributed to altered auditory input, which suggests that abnormal speech processing in PWS results from abnormal processing of auditory input. However, the details of this abnormal processing of basic auditory information remain unclear. In order to characterize such abnormalities, we examined the functional and structural changes in the auditory cortices of PWS by using a 306-channel magnetoencephalography system to assess auditory sensory gating (P50m suppression) and tonotopic organization.