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Columns::April 1, 2002
61st Peabody Awards: September 11 programming prominent among this year’s winners
Kleven, head of avian medicine, is named a Regents Professor
International symposium participants will discuss biotechnology in textiles
Food safety director will deliver annual Woodroof Lecture
Out of the woods
Driven to succeed
Human development specialist’s career is an extension of himself
New director appointed to Coca-Cola Center for Marketing Studies
Newsmakers
New recruitment office opens in metro Atlanta
Campus News
Researcher receives $1 million grant to study stuttering in children
By Michael Childs
mchilds@coe.uga.edu
A College of Education researcher has been awarded a $1.07 million National Institutes of Health grant to study the standards
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| Anne Cordes Bothe |
of measurement, treatment and recovery of stuttering in preschool-age children.
Anne Cordes Bothe, an associate professor in the department of communication sciences and disorders, was awarded the five-year grant by the National Institute for Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, a division of the NIH.
Stuttering affects as much as 5 percent of children between the ages of three and five. About 1 percent of adults stutter. In adults, the disorder is more prevalent in males than females by about 4 to 1.
Bothe will focus the first phase of her research on the development of a measurement standard that will help researchers and clinicians define the severity of a child’s stuttering. She believes the variation in measurement of child stuttering is why treatment often fails.
“Most current measurement systems for children’s stuttering are based on identifying individual dysfluency types, such as repetitions or prolongations of speech sounds, despite the fact that this data is known to have poor reliability and questionable validity,” says Bothe. “I use a parallel when I’m teaching--it’s as if you’re using a rubber band to make measurements in construction.”
To establish this standard of measurement in children’s stuttering, Bothe plans to replicate the measuring system she and a colleague, Roger Ingham of the University of California, have developed for adult stuttering over the last decade. The system has resulted in psychometrically improved measurements.
During the first phase of the project, Bothe will record and gather hundreds of videotapes of children’s stutters, sending samples of their speech to about 10 researchers around the world who are known to be experts in child stuttering treatment for their judgment as to what is and what is not stuttering.
“After our experts define what is child stuttering, we will be able to develop training material. We’ll have an audio-visual, computer-driven training system in which we can really see and hear what we call a stutter,” she says.
Once the measuring tool is in place, Bothe will look at why some children seem to recover from their stuttering without treatment. Experts say that 20-80 percent of children who stutter will recover without treatment. The big range in percentage largely reflects the lack of a measurement tool and how experts differ in defining a stutter.
“But everybody agrees that some--at least 20 percent--recover without treatment and there are lots of reasons proposed for why this happens,” says Bothe. “One hypothesis--that’s actually been around for 20 years now, but has never been tested--is that children who recover are actually getting some treatment from their parents.”
Bothe says many experts believe that parents naturally do what a speech pathologist might do. When a child stutters, a parent might say, “Oh, oh. Say it again for me,” or “Hey, hon--try that again,” or “Slow down. Try it nice and smooth for me.”
So in the second part of the project, Bothe will seek 100 families in the Southeast with preschoolers who are just starting to stutter. She’ll ask these families to place a video camera in their kitchen or wherever they have the most interaction with their children.
“We’ll be looking at how much the child stutters, what the parents say when the child stutters and what their siblings do. It might be that it’s kind of a peer pressure or sibling pressure that helps them recover,” says Bothe.
The third part of the project will be a treatment comparison study in which children of the 100 families participating in the study who do not recover during the eight-week observation will be provided treatment.
“I’ll train the parents in different ways and compare how effective those are at helping their children,” says Bothe, who has studied stuttering for more than 15 years. She says experts have theories but no definitive answer about the cause of stuttering.
“Our best guess right now is that stuttering is a genetic predisposition to some real neurophysiological problems,” she says. “We’re finding some very clear brain differences in adults who stutter as compared to those who don’t. But it’s a little hard to tell when you look at the brain of an adult who has stuttered for 20 or 30 years, because we have a cause-and-effect problem. Are the differences in the brain causing the stutter, or are they the result of having stuttered for so long?”
Brain imaging has yet to be done on children who stutter because most of the technology, up to this point, has required radioactive tracers. “That’s changing now, but we have not solved it just yet,” Bothe says.
Bothe will have assistance in the project from three colleagues at other institutions: Patrick Finn, University of Arizona; Shelly Brundage, St. Cloud State University; and Susan Felsenfeld, Duquesne University. Two of her UGA doctoral students, Bradley Crowe and Jason Davidow, will assist in the project, as will several other master’s and doctoral students to be named later.
Bothe is a fellow of UGA’s Institute of Behavioral Research, whose faculty mentoring program has brought in almost $13 million in currently funded grants.
IBR mentoring program allows faculty to ‘apply’ themselves
The Institute for Behavioral Research’s mentoring program offers faculty members the opportunity to hone their grant application skills by working with senior faculty, who serve as mentors. Over the course of a year, participants develop their research projects and prepare proposals for extramural funding.
Paul Roman, Distinguished Research Professor of Sociology and co-director of the IBR program, says the participants learn by interacting with their mentors but also with each other.
“The program has been successful beyond our expectations,” he says. “It’s developed a culture of its own.”
Since the program began in 1990, 59 faculty members have participated, resulting in 27 extramurally funded proposals worth more than $11 million.
The mentoring program is administered by the IBR in conjunction with the Office of the Vice President for Research. For more information, call 542-6074.
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