Walla Peter, Mayer Dagmar, Deecke Lüder, Thurner Stefan
Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Functional Brain Topography, Department of Clinical Neurology, Medical University of Vienna, Währinger Gürtel 18-20, 1090 Vienna, Austria.
Neuroimage. 2004 Jul;22(3):1321-7. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2004.03.029.
The motivation of this work was to investigate stuttering--a disorder of speech motor control--in the light of preparatory neural activity of voluntary movements related to speech. To this end, brain activity was recorded with a whole cortex magnetoencephalograph (MEG) in developmental stutterers and nonstutterers while three different tasks of single-word reading were performed. Visually presented words had to be silently read immediately after word presentation (condition 1), spoken aloud immediately after word presentation (condition 2), or spoken aloud after a delay of 1.3 s as indicated by a second visual stimulus (condition 3). Condition 2 clearly showed marked neurophysiological differences between stutterers and nonstutterers. Only nonstutterers showed clear neural activity before speech onset, which is interpreted as being linked to visual word presentation and to reflect focused verbal anticipation. This prespeech activity might reflect the "Bereitschaftsfeld2" (BF2) that is the later component of the "Bereitschaftsfeld", a well-known preparatory activity described for many other voluntary movements. Our results strongly link the lack of such preparatory brain activity at the single-word level to the disability of fluent speech in stutterers. The present results strongly support the notion that stuttering is related to impaired focused attention or anticipation.
这项研究的目的是根据与言语相关的自主运动的预备神经活动来研究口吃——一种言语运动控制障碍。为此，在发育性口吃者和非口吃者执行三项不同的单字阅读任务时，使用全脑皮层脑磁图（MEG）记录大脑活动。视觉呈现的单词在呈现后必须立即默读（条件1），在呈现后立即大声朗读（条件2），或者如第二个视觉刺激所示在延迟1.3秒后大声朗读（条件3）。条件2清楚地显示了口吃者和非口吃者之间明显的神经生理学差异。只有非口吃者在言语开始前表现出明显的神经活动，这被解释为与视觉单词呈现有关，并反映了集中的言语预期。这种言语前活动可能反映了“准备场2”（BF2），它是“准备场”的后期成分，“准备场”是一种为许多其他自主运动所描述的著名的预备活动。我们的结果有力地将单字水平上这种预备性大脑活动的缺乏与口吃者流利言语的障碍联系起来。目前的结果有力地支持了口吃与注意力集中或预期受损有关的观点。
