Songbird Offers Clues to Help Stutterers

Tiny songbirds known as zebra finches might help researchers better understand stuttering in humans.

Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine and The Methodist Hospital are using the zebra finch as an animal model for stuttering to learn more about how speech disorders develop in the brain. They hope to apply their findings to treatments for pediatric and adult patients at The Stuttering Center at Baylor and Methodist.

"Zebra finches have a very distinctive song, and some of these birds repeat certain sounds just like someone who stutters repeats parts of words," says Dr. David Rosenfield, director of The Stuttering Center. "If we can determine whether the problem is inherited or acquired, we should be able to learn more about the neurological changes in the brain that cause stuttering."

By recording the zebra finches' song and analyzing segments of sounds, Dr. Rosenfield and colleagues can identify repetitions that correspond to stuttering.

After a stuttering bird is identified, the researchers can test whether its offspring produce the same repetition of sounds innately when raised in isolation from the parent.

"This will show whether there's a genetic component to stuttering," says Dr. Rosenfield, a Baylor professor of neurology and a neurologist at Methodist.

The researchers are also raising non-stuttering zebra finches in the presence of stuttering songbirds to see whether they acquire the repetition of sounds just from hearing them.

Likewise, they are raising some stuttering baby finches in the presence of normal finches to see whether the young songbirds learn to sing without stuttering.

Dr. Rosenfield, working with Dr. Santosh Helekar, Baylor assistant professor of neurology, will study brain cells in the stuttering and non-stuttering zebra finches. How cells respond when the finch is learning a song, how abnormal song patterns are represented in the brain, and how the cells change when a stuttering finch adapts to singing without repetition could offer clues to how to produce changes in the behavior of human stutterers.

"Stuttering is a complex behavior linked to how the brain controls the output of sound," Dr. Rosenfield says. "It is not a psychological problem, nor is it a problem with the larynx or voice box.

"What we learn from zebra finches could help us develop drugs or other techniques to interrupt the cell-to-cell communication in the brain that produces stuttering in humans," he says.

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©2006 Texas Medical Center

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