快猫短视频

SOME birds stutter just like people. 快猫短视频s have found that zebra finches
mistakenly repeat song syllables, and studying the birds could help them come up
with new treatments for stuttering.

Stutters are thought to be caused by disturbances in the speech motor control
regions of the brain. So although speech therapy can alleviate the problem, it
does not treat the cause, says neurologist David Rosenfield of Baylor College of
Medicine in Houston, Texas.

Birds use similar brain processes to learn and sing songs as people do to
learn and speak languages. 鈥淲e wanted to know whether we could take a look at
the birdsong and learn about speech from it,鈥� Rosenfield says.

To do so, Rosenfield and his colleagues Nagalapura Viswanath and Santosh
Helekar recorded the songs of 76 male zebra finches housed in their lab. Digital
analysis revealed that the birds sometimes deleted syllables, altered them or
inserted new ones into songs they had learnt. And 7 per cent of the birds
regularly stuttered, repeating the same syllable over and over again, until
finally breaking out into the rest of the song.

Although stuttering is thought to have a genetic component, all the
stuttering birds had fluent parents, so they had not learnt it from them. The
phenomenon has previously only been observed in birds that have brain
damage.

鈥淲e鈥檙e unbelievably excited by this,鈥� says Rosenfield, who presented the
findings at a meeting of the American Neurological Association in Seattle last
week. 快猫短视频s will be able to use the finches to study stuttering and test
drugs. 鈥淭he implications for working on the treatment of stuttering are
enormous,鈥� says Rosenfield. 鈥淎t the present time there aren鈥檛 any drugs that
have been shown to be really helpful.鈥�