DON鈥橳 speak before you know what you鈥檙e going to say. That鈥檚 the lesson from
a study on stuttering by researchers in Finland and Germany.
Riitta Salmelin at the Helsinki University of Technology and her colleagues
asked nine long-term stutterers and 10 fluent speakers to read out individual
words from a list. As they did so, their brain activity was monitored using a
technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG), which identifies precisely where
and, crucially, when regions of the brain are activated.
Fluent speakers first activated a part of the brain that decides what to say
and then a part that works out how to say it. The stutterers鈥� brains did the
opposite, the researchers found (Brain, vol 123, p 1184). 鈥淪tutterers
were somehow initiating their mouth muscles before they knew what they were
going to say,鈥漵ays Salmelin.
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