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From: Lisa LaSalle
Date: 10 Oct 2010
Time: 19:06:15 -0500
Remote Name: 69.222.77.74
Hi Cindy, You are asking well-researched questions and your son is lucky to have a mom who is advocating for him. It sounds like his SLP is collecting helpful info about your son's speech and language disorder from his classroom teacher, and that she is leaning towards a diagnosis of cluttering. A few key features of cluttering are: (1) fast-sounding arrhythmic or choppy speech rate, characterized by omitting the weak syllables in words (so “saxophone” sounds like “saffone” or “telescope” becomes “tescope”); (2) excessive repetitions of part-words, whole-words and phrases; (3) utterances that are not well-formulated; (4) lack of self-awareness of the speaker who clutters that there is a problem. You asked, “how is cluttering best diagnosed by a SLP?” The answer is that there are a number of ways, and only a questionnaire of a classroom teacher would not be enough. Most SLPs like to get a case history from you, the parent. Here is where the diagnosis of the neuropsychologist in your son’s case would be helpful, as the testing he or she did would be good for comparison purposes. There is a large co-occurrence of learning disabilities and cluttering. Then we would collect a representative spontaneous speech sample, assess the types of disfluencies occurring, and test speech and language areas through standardized (norms) or criterion-referenced (checklist-type measures). We would want to rule out a hearing loss, ask the child to say “puh-tuh-kuh” as many times as he can, as fast as he can, which is called diadochokinetic speech rate and can be compared to norms for how rapidly and accurately can the speaker move their articulators?) I’m a little more concerned about my ability to adequately respond to your last set of Qs because I believe that he SHOULD get services, and I am not familiar with the current state guidelines that you refer to, where “a child nine years of age and older is not eligible to receive stand alone services.” So are you saying that you were told by your son’s school SLP that she would not be able to provide speech services for him, whether or not she diagnoses him with cluttering? Perhaps other professors who are familiar with this state guideline will weigh in. There are some great resources out there for SLPs who work with students who have the speech disorder known as cluttering, but that does not seem to be the problem if the SLP has claimed that due to state guidelines, she will not be able to work with him. Anyway, I hope my partial answer is a start for you. We all learn from the different problems and perspectives brought to this conference.