New paper on state and trait effects in imaging of people who stutter

We published a new paper in the journal Human Brain Mapping describing differences in brain activity during speech production in people who stutter.  We showed trait differences in brain activity during fluent speech in people who stutter compared with fluent speaking control participants.  Interestingly, our results showed reduced activity in many brain areas in people who stutter but no areas of overactivity, which contrasts with many previous results.  We suspect this difference may be due to the fact that we excluded brain imaging data associated with speech disfluency.  We also found state differences in people who stutter, that is, differences in brain activity between states of fluency and states of stuttering.  In these analyses, we saw considerable overactivity during disfluency, which is consistent with our interpretation above that previous studies showing both over and underactivity in comparisons of people who stutter and controls reflects a combination of activity during fluent and disfluent states.