Dataset Information

Neural network connectivity differences in children who stutter.

ABSTRACT: Affecting 1% of the general population, stuttering impairs the normally effortless process of speech production, which requires precise coordination of sequential movement occurring among the articulatory, respiratory, and resonance systems, all within millisecond time scales. Those afflicted experience frequent disfluencies during ongoing speech, often leading to negative psychosocial consequences. The aetiology of stuttering remains unclear; compared to other neurodevelopmental disorders, few studies to date have examined the neural bases of childhood stuttering. Here we report, for the first time, results from functional (resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging) and structural connectivity analyses (probabilistic tractography) of multimodal neuroimaging data examining neural networks in children who stutter. We examined how synchronized brain activity occurring among brain areas associated with speech production, and white matter tracts that interconnect them, differ in young children who stutter (aged 3-9 years) compared with age-matched peers. Results showed that children who stutter have attenuated connectivity in neural networks that support timing of self-paced movement control. The results suggest that auditory-motor and basal ganglia-thalamocortical networks develop differently in stuttering children, which may in turn affect speech planning and execution processes needed to achieve fluent speech motor control. These results provide important initial evidence of neurological differences in the early phases of symptom onset in children who stutter.

SUBMITTER: Chang SE

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3859219 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Neural network connectivity differences in children who stutter.

Chang Soo-Eun SE Zhu David C DC

Brain : a journal of neurology 20131016 Pt 12

Affecting 1% of the general population, stuttering impairs the normally effortless process of speech production, which requires precise coordination of sequential movement occurring among the articulatory, respiratory, and resonance systems, all within millisecond time scales. Those afflicted experience frequent disfluencies during ongoing speech, often leading to negative psychosocial consequences. The aetiology of stuttering remains unclear; compared to other neurodevelopmental disorders, few ...[more]

PMID: 24131593

Similar Datasets

Project description:We present a simple model for coherent, spatially correlated chaos in a recurrent neural network. Networks of randomly connected neurons exhibit chaotic fluctuations and have been studied as a model for capturing the temporal variability of cortical activity. The dynamics generated by such networks, however, are spatially uncorrelated and do not generate coherent fluctuations, which are commonly observed across spatial scales of the neocortex. In our model we introduce a structured component of connectivity, in addition to random connections, which effectively embeds a feedforward structure via unidirectional coupling between a pair of orthogonal modes. Local fluctuations driven by the random connectivity are summed by an output mode and drive coherent activity along an input mode. The orthogonality between input and output mode preserves chaotic fluctuations by preventing feedback loops. In the regime of weak structured connectivity we apply a perturbative approach to solve the dynamic mean-field equations, showing that in this regime coherent fluctuations are driven passively by the chaos of local residual fluctuations. When we introduce a row balance constraint on the random connectivity, stronger structured connectivity puts the network in a distinct dynamical regime of self-tuned coherent chaos. In this regime the coherent component of the dynamics self-adjusts intermittently to yield periods of slow, highly coherent chaos. The dynamics display longer time-scales and switching-like activity. We show how in this regime the dynamics depend qualitatively on the particular realization of the connectivity matrix: a complex leading eigenvalue can yield coherent oscillatory chaos while a real leading eigenvalue can yield chaos with broken symmetry. The level of coherence grows with increasing strength of structured connectivity until the dynamics are almost entirely constrained to a single spatial mode. We examine the effects of network-size scaling and show that these results are not finite-size effects. Finally, we show that in the regime of weak structured connectivity, coherent chaos emerges also for a generalized structured connectivity with multiple input-output modes.

Dataset Information

Neural network connectivity differences in children who stutter.

Publications

Neural network connectivity differences in children who stutter.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets