Stutter
Stutter
Stutter, one of the reiterative speech disorders, is usually a developmental problem, but may be acquired in aphasia with unilateral or bilateral hemisphere lesions (e.g., vascular damage, trauma, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, progressive supranuclear palsy). Unlike developmental stutter, acquired stutter may be evident throughout sentences, rather than just at the beginning. Furthermore, developmental stutter tends to occur more with plosives (phonemes where the flow of air is temporarily blocked and suddenly released, as in ‘p’, ‘b’), whereas acquired stutter is said to affect all speech sounds fairly equally. Cessation of developmental stutter following bilateral thalamic infarction in adult life has been reported.
References
Fleet WS, Heilman KM. Acquired stuttering from a right hemisphere lesion in a right-hander. Neurology 1985; 35: 1343-1346
Muroi A, Hirayama K, Tanno Y, Shimizu S, Watanabe T, Yamamoto T. Cessation of stuttering after bilateral thalamic infarction. Neurology1999; 53: 890-891
Cross References
