Many twentieth-century British and American educators, psychologists, and psychiatrists advocated forcing left-handed children to write with their right hands. These experts asserted that a child's decision to rely on his or her left hand was a reflection of a defiant personality that could best be corrected by forcible switching. The methods used to retrain left-handers were often tortuous, in...

Stuttering is a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with left inferior frontal structural anomalies. While children often recover, stuttering may also spontaneously disappear much later after years of dysfluency. These rare cases of unassisted recovery in adulthood provide a model of optimal brain repair outside the classical windows of developmental plasticity. Here we explore what distingu...

This investigation concerns the persistence of stuttering and recovery from it among highrisk children. At the end of the second year of a 6-year prospective study, 26 of 93 preschool children with a parental history of stuttering were classified as stutterers. Four years later, seven of these children were classified as persistent stutterers, and 16 children were classified as recovered stutte...

Stuttering is a disturbance in the normal fluency and time patterning of speech. Developmental stuttering (DS), with or without associated psychiatric illness, is the most common form and includes all cases with gradual onset in childhood that are not the result of acquired brain damage. Persistent developmental stuttering (PDS) is DS that has not undergone spontaneous or speech-therapy-induced...

Objectives: This investigation aimed to compare the performance of two software packages, namely “Computerized Scoring of the Stuttering Severity (CSSS)” and “Praat,” in calculating the mean duration of stuttered syllables. Methods: In this descriptive-analytical study, 35 eligible stuttering subjects (26 male and 9 female), aged between 18 and 42 (m=26.23±6.02) ...

Developmental stuttering is a disorder of speech fluency affecting 1% of the adult population. Long-term reductions in stuttering are difficult for adults to achieve with behavioural therapies. We investigated whether a single session of transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) could improve fluency in people who stutter (PWS). In separate sessions, either anodal TDCS (1mA for 20min) or s...