The neurological underpinnings of cluttering: Some initial findings

•We use fMRI to examine brain function in adults who clutter (AWC) and controls (CON).•Data were collected from two speaking conditions: spontaneous speech and oral reading.•AWC had greater activity than CON in premotor cortex and pre-supplementary motor area.•AWC showed increased basal ganglia acti...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of fluency disorders 2015-03, Vol.43, p.1-16
Main Authors: Ward, David, Connally, Emily L., Pliatsikas, Christos, Bretherton-Furness, Jess, Watkins, Kate E.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Adult
Basal Ganglia - physiopathology
Brain - physiopathology
Brain Mapping
Cerebellum - physiopathology
Cluttering
Comorbidity
Female
Fluency
fMRI
Frontal Lobe - physiopathology
Humans
Magnetic Resonance Imaging
Male
Middle Aged
Reading
Speech - physiology
Speech Disorders - physiopathology
Speech Production Measurement
Stuttering
Stuttering - physiopathology
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Summary:•We use fMRI to examine brain function in adults who clutter (AWC) and controls (CON).•Data were collected from two speaking conditions: spontaneous speech and oral reading.•AWC had greater activity than CON in premotor cortex and pre-supplementary motor area.•AWC showed increased basal ganglia activity over control speakers.•We discuss the implications of these findings for a model of cluttering. Cluttering is a fluency disorder characterised by overly rapid or jerky speech patterns that compromise intelligibility. The neural correlates of cluttering are unknown but theoretical accounts implicate the basal ganglia and medial prefrontal cortex. Dysfunction in these brain areas would be consistent with difficulties in selection and control of speech motor programs that are characteristic of speech disfluencies in cluttering. There is a surprising lack of investigation into this disorder using modern imaging techniques. Here, we used functional MRI to investigate the neural correlates of cluttering. We scanned 17 adults who clutter and 17 normally fluent control speakers matched for age and sex. Brain activity was recorded using sparse-sampling functional MRI while participants viewed scenes and either (i) produced overt speech describing the scene or (ii) read out loud a sentence provided that described the scene. Speech was recorded and analysed off line. Differences in brain activity for each condition compared to a silent resting baseline and between conditions were analysed for each group separately (cluster-forming threshold Z>3.1, extent p
ISSN:0094-730X
1873-801X
DOI:10.1016/j.jfludis.2014.12.003