John Houde
University of California-San Francisco, CA·Neuroscience
When the cerebellum, a brain structure at the back of the skull that helps coordinate movement, is damaged, speech almost always suffers. People with cerebellar ataxia (CA), a condition caused by cerebellar degeneration or injury, often develop dysarthria: slurred, less natural speech that is harder to understand and lowers quality of life.
- Fields
Neuroscience
Medicine & Clinical Research
Psychology
- Topics
cerebellum
speech motor control
cerebellar ataxia
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through May 2030
What they work on
- Relate the location of cerebellar degeneration to specific speech symptoms such as articulation, pitch and timing problems in patients with cerebellar ataxia, using speech psychophysics experiments.
- Test whether the cerebellum generates and updates the sensory predictions used for feedforward speech control by comparing ataxia patients, acute cerebellar stroke patients, and healthy speakers.
- Measure how cerebellar damage changes speech-related activity in the cerebral cortex using magnetoencephalography (MEG), which records the brain's magnetic signals during speaking and speech learning.
- Briefly disrupt cerebellar function in healthy speakers with continuous theta-burst transcranial magnetic stimulation (cTBS) to test whether patients develop compensatory changes in feedback control.
More about the research
Scientists still do not understand how the cerebellum contributes to speech, or how damage to it affects the brain's wider speech network. As a result, there are no evidence-based treatments to improve speech in CA.
Why it matters
People with cerebellar ataxia or cerebellar stroke often lose clear, natural speech, and no evidence-based therapy exists to restore it. By identifying which speech-control processes break down, and why patients differ, this work could lay the groundwork for treatments for dysarthria. These treatments could be tailored to the location and cause of each patient's cerebellar damage.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
David Ostry
Yale University, CT·Neuroscience
Test whether auditory, somatosensory or motor cortex is causally needed to retain newly learned speech movements by suppressing each area with continuous theta-burst stimulation (cTBS) after learning.
Taraz Lee
University of Michigan, MI·Neuroscience
Test whether error-driven adaptation of spatial working memory shares the hallmark features of motor adaptation and uses the same computations as adapting saccades, the quick jumps of the eyes.
Joy Schmitz
University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, TX·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether adding active rather than sham deep TMS with an H4 coil to contingency management raises abstinence, increases cocaine-negative urines and reduces craving in people who do not respond to contingency management alone.
The school
University of California-San Francisco: 89 labs on PI Pages, $2.1B a year on research, 164 research doctorates a year.
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