RESEARCH General Health

STUTTERING
Multimillion-dollar grant to fund more research into speech disorder

Melissa Mitchell, Arts Editor
(217) 333-5491; melissa@uiuc.edu

5/1/02

Photo by Bill Wiegand Thirteen years of work by Ehud Yairi, professor of speech and hearing science and director of the Stuttering Research Project at Illinois, has resulted in a re-examination of traditional therapeutic strategies for treating young children who stutter.

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- Research on stuttering conducted during the past 13 years at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has produced a wealth of new knowledge about the cause, onset, early characteristics, and developmental course of the disorder. And, according to Ehud Yairi, professor of speech and hearing science and director of the Stuttering Research Project at Illinois, that work has resulted in a re-examination of traditional therapeutic strategies for treating young children who stutter.

Now, thanks to a $4 million grant from the National Institutes of Health-National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, Yairi and his colleagues hope to further expand the existing knowledge base on stuttering. The project, which seeks to identify subtypes of stuttering, includes 11 scientists from Illinois, Northern Illinois University, Eastern Illinois University, University of Chicago, University of Iowa, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee and Purdue University.

Yairi said the new grant "is the largest in the country in terms of funding, and quite likely, in the scope and level of activities." As principal investigator, the Illinois professor will provide leadership for the entire project, which will explore four sets of factors that are believed to play a role in the onset and development of childhood stuttering. Areas to be examined and individuals heading the studies are language function, Ruth Watkins, Illinois; epidemiology, Nicoline Ambrose, Illinois; motor/physiological functions, Patricia Zebrowski, Iowa; and psychological factors, Ellen Kelly, Purdue.

"In many respects, stuttering is a disorder of early childhood," Yairi said, noting that close to 80 percent of children who stutter begin by age 3 1/2. "However, most children -- about 75 percent -- develop normal speech fluency within about four years of stuttering onset. That alters the traditional model," he said, which held that children who did not receive intervention continued to get worse. In fact, Yairi said, Illinois researchers have found that "the majority is getting better and better." And for reasons yet to be determined, girls stand a better chance for what he terms "natural recovery."

Also notable, Yairi said, is that "our findings show that genetic factors play an important role not only in the cause of stuttering but also in the recovery and persistency pathways."

The new project's investigators will employ many tests and experimental tasks for children who stutter, for those who don’t, and for parents of both groups. After the data are analyzed, "We hope to have initial indications for differentiating among people who stutter, and for identifying risk factors for chronic, persistent stuttering as well as clinical predictors for those who recover," Yairi said.

Other ongoing projects at the Illinois Stuttering Research Program include Yairi's longitudinal studies of preschool-age children who stutter and normally fluent children; Ambrose's work that seeks to identify a possible genetic cause; speech and hearing science professor Adele Proctor's study on the incidence of stuttering in African-American children; and speech and hearing science professor Ken Watkin's use of imaging techniques to examine the structural characteristics of brains of stutterers.