Verbal fluency

The other day someone asked me what ‘verbal fluency’ meant. I wasn’t very convincing. So I did a little searching. Verbal fluency refers to the ability to quickly access your mental vocabulary.. selecting appropriate and discarding less appropriate words ..while speaking or writing. If you've ever struggled searching through synonyms in a thesaurus ..fell short of a witty comeback .. or failed to persuade someone of something you know well ..then you understand the importance of verbal fluency. Boosting or recovering a patients’ verbal fluency is one of the objectives of speech therapy. Verbal fluency eludes me a lot of the time. Oh well oh well..

Neural basis of stuttering

The neural basis of stuttering has to do with the integration of auditory information with speech-production commands. Previous studies show that stutterers’ produce a weaker-than-normal compensatory response while processing auditory feedback during speech. In this study they manipulated auditory feedback in order to see if weak compensatory responses are due to problems hearing feedback or using feedback. What they found is that stutterers’ have no difficulty hearing feedback, which narrows it down to functional areas responsible for using feedback ..or those areas responsible for translating performance-to-target feedback into corrective speech-action commands [link]