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Research Summary: Variability of Speech Movements

I’m excited to share some results with you! This work is from the vocal tract MRI session during the first visit to Oxford (the baseline session). You can listen to me chat about these results in this video (transcript available below video) or read the full paper here.

There’s been a lot of interest as to whether brain stimulation, specifically, Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS), can improve symptoms associated with movement disorders, including Parkinson’s disease and stroke. Our ongoing work at the University of Oxford (the INSTEP trial) aims to investigate whether multiple sessions of tDCS can enhance fluency in people who stutter....

Sometimes people who stutter are aware of upcoming words that may result in dysfluencies and, in order to conceal their stutter, may choose to replace those words on-the-fly. This process might rely on “proactive control” – i.e. the ability to prepare for upcoming conflicts and react to them.

I really enjoyed chatting with Action for Stammering Children youth panellist, Joe! We chatted about the “Hows Whats and Whys” of cognitive neuroscience research into stammering.

We have a new study running in the lab. Find out what the project is about and how to take part in the research!

Eine deutsche Version ist verfügbar | A German version is available

A single image taken using MRI of the vocal tract. Air is shown in black and tissue is shown in white. The vocal tract, including lips, tongue, velum and larynx, is visible

What happens in the vocal tract during a stutter? Here's a research summary of a paper which describes the vocal tract of a single speaker during stuttering.