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. 2019 Oct 9:13:356.
doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2019.00356. eCollection 2019.

Sympathetic Nervous System Activity in Preschoolers Who Stutter

Bridget Walsh  1 , Anne Smith  2 , Sharon L Christ  3 , Christine Weber  2
Affiliations

Sympathetic Nervous System Activity in Preschoolers Who Stutter

Bridget Walsh et al. Front Hum Neurosci. .

Abstract

Background: In our Dynamic Pathways, account, we hypothesized that childhood stuttering reflects an impairment in speech sensorimotor control that is conditioned by cognitive, linguistic, and emotional factors. The purpose of this study was to investigate potential differences in levels of sympathetic arousal during performance of speech and non-speech tasks between children who do and do not stutter.

Methods: Seventy-two preschool-aged children participated in the study, 47 children who stutter (CWS; 38 boys) and 25 children who do not stutter (CWNS; 18 boys). We recorded skin conductance and blood pulse volume (BPV) signals, indices of sympathetic arousal, during higher/lower load speech tasks (structured sentence production and picture description) and non-speech tasks (jaw wagging and forceful blowing). We included a measure that reflects children's attitudes about their communication skills and a parent-report assessment of temperament.

Results: We found no significant differences between preschool CWS and CWNS in phasic skin conductance response amplitude or frequency, BPV, and pulse rate for any of the experimental tasks. However, compared to CWNS, CWS had, on average, significantly higher skin conductance levels (SCL), indexing slowly changing tonic sympathetic activity, across both speech and non-speech experimental conditions. We found distinctive task-related profiles of sympathetic arousal in both groups of preschool children. Most children produced the highest levels of sympathetic arousal in the physically demanding blowing task rather than in speech, as seen in previous studies of adults. We did not find differences in temperament between the two groups of preschool children nor a relationship among behavioral indices of temperament and communication attitude and physiological measures of sympathetic arousal.

Conclusion: We did not find that atypically high, speech-related sympathetic arousal is a significant factor in early childhood stuttering. Rather, CWS had higher, on average, task-related tonic SCLs across speech and non-speech tasks. A relationship among behavioral measures of temperament and physiological measures of sympathetic arousal was not confirmed. Key questions for future experiments are how the typical coupling of sympathetic and speech sensorimotor systems develops over childhood and adolescence and whether task related developmental profiles follow a different course in children who continue to stutter.

Keywords: autonomic nervous system; blood pulse volume; children; electrodermal activity; pulse rate; speech; stuttering; sympathetic arousal.

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Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Sympathetic nervous system (SNS) recordings from a CWS during the picture description task. The waveforms represent, from top to bottom, the acoustic signal, blood pulse volume (BPV) signal, phasic skin conductance response (SCR), and tonic skin conductance level (SCL). Utterances were extracted from the long recording by identifying speech onsets and offsets within the acoustic record.
FIGURE 2
FIGURE 2
Model means and standard error estimate bars for skin conductance measures from each group plotted by task. The graphs show the skin conductance response amplitude (left), skin conductance response frequency (middle), and tonic skin conductance level (SCL) (right). BASE, initial baseline; JAW, jaw opening/closing; SENT, structured sentence production; PIC, picture description task; MAX, blowing/maximal maneuver.
FIGURE 3
FIGURE 3
Individual points from CWS (triangles) and CWNS (circles) of a participant’s average PIC skin conductance level (SCL) plotted against their average MAX SCL and identity line. Units are in microSiemens. These raw means are slightly different from the estimated marginal means used in the statistical models reported in the Results section.
FIGURE 4
FIGURE 4
Model means and standard error estimate bars for blood pulse volume (BPV) amplitude (left graph) and pulse rate (right graph) from each group plotted by task. BASE, initial baseline; JAW, jaw opening/closing; SENT, structured sentence production; PIC, picture description task; MAX, blowing/maximal maneuver.
FIGURE 5
FIGURE 5
Individual CWS data points showing each child’s WSI score plotted against their average skin conductance level (SCL) from the PIC task.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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