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Our paper on "Speech movement variability in people who stutter: a vocal tract magnetic resonance imaging study" was selected as the winner of the Editor's award in the Speech section of the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research.

Graph showing duration of responses measured using vocal-tract MRI. Data from people who stutter are shown in red and data from people who are typically fluent are shown in blue.  Participants spoke four-syllable, complex words ( like “mabshaytiedoib”), four-syllable simple words (like “mabteebeebee”) as well as 1, 2 and 3-sylllable words. Violin plots are shown to visualize the distribution of data and its probability density for each group separately for each syllable set. Solid horizontal lines represent the median, and dashed lines show the interquartile range. As the number of syllables increased so did the length of time to repeat the words.  This was also higher when the word was complex.  The people who stutter took longer to repeat the words and this difference was biggest for the longest and most complex words.
Graph showing duration of responses measured using vocal-tract MRI. Data from people who stutter are shown in red and data from people who are typically fluent are shown in blue. Participants spoke four-syllable, complex words ( like “mabshaytiedoib”), four-syllable simple words (like “mabteebeebee”) as well as 1, 2 and 3-sylllable words. Violin plots are shown to visualize the distribution of data and its probability density for each group separately for each syllable set. Solid horizontal lines represent the median, and dashed lines show the interquartile range. As the number of syllables increased so did the length of time to repeat the words. This was also higher when the word was complex. The people who stutter took longer to repeat the words and this difference was biggest for the longest and most complex words.

Congratulations to the INSTEP team, Charlie Wiltshire, Jen Chesters, Mairead MacSweeney, Kate Watkins and our physics collaborator Mark Chiew!  "An Editor's Award is truly a high honor, with selection limited to the most impactful worlds that meet the highest quality standards in research design and presentation".  We are grateful to our participants who volunteered for this study and to the people at OHBA and WIN who helped with scanning.  We also thank the Editor-in-Chief and editors of the Speech section of JSLHR at ASHA Journals for this recognition. Read the paper here https://doi.org/10.1044/2021_JSLHR-20-00507