But stuttering tends to run in families, a fact that prompted Drayna and colleagues to search for a genetic link.

VOA: standard.2010.02.11

Stuttering's cause has long been a mystery, but it has frequently been diagnosed as a psychological problem.

VOA: standard.2010.02.11

Fisher notes that not every stutterer in the Drayna study had the defective gene, meaning there must be a number of other genes tied to stuttering.

VOA: standard.2010.02.11

An article on the discovery of a gene associated with stuttering, and the commentary by Simon Fisher, are published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine.

VOA: standard.2010.02.11

He is hopeful there could eventually be a similar treatment for stuttering.

VOA: standard.2010.02.11

But for people who continue to stutter into adulthood, researcher Dennis Drayna of the US National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicable Disorders says stuttering can be profoundly disabling.

VOA: standard.2010.02.11

But in a published commentary on the research,Simon Fisher, a speech and language researcher at the Wellcome Trust Center for Human Genetics at Oxford University cautions that before researchers can develop a drug therapy for stuttering,they will need to learn much more about the precise biochemical mechanism of the disorder.

VOA: standard.2010.02.11

Warren says now that researchers have a map of the zebra finch genome, they can carry out experiments to identify which genes in the finch's brain are most critical to hearing and producing song - and by extension, which genes may play a role in human speech disorders, like those related to stuttering, autism,and Parkinson's disease.

VOA: standard.2010.04.05