DON’T speak before you know what you’re going to say. That’s the lesson from
a study on stuttering by researchers in Finland and Germany.
Riitta Salmelin at the Helsinki University of Technology and her colleagues
asked nine long-term stutterers and 10 fluent speakers to read out individual
words from a list. As they did so, their brain activity was monitored using a
technique called magnetoencephalography (MEG), which identifies precisely where
and, crucially, when regions of the brain are activated.
Fluent speakers first activated a part of the brain that decides what to say
and then a part that works out…
