[ Contents | Search | Next | Previous | Up ]
From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 10 Oct 2011
Time: 11:58:18 -0500
Remote Name: 157.182.15.31
Damon, I'm writing this message after my reply to your later message about person-first labeling. I am definitely not the "#1 expert" on cluttering, but some people think I know something about the disorder. You may know that an "expert" is a "has been" ("ex") and a "drip under high pressure" "spurt." <smile> I don't think anyone knows for sure how many individuals both stutter and clutter. Van Riper, who described the Track II cluttering type of stutterer and Alf Preus who carried out a large study in Norway reported about 25% of their stutterers with these characteristics. In a special edition of the Journal of Fluency Disorders with 29 total clutterers, authors identified 31% of them as stuttering and another 10% as possibly stuttering. The figure of coexistence is not well established because we have not yet agreed entirely on a definition of cluttering. Thus, your 35% figure is probably not too far off. As for the language/motor questions, some authorities, such as my close friend and colleague, Florence Myers, believe that cluttering reflects a language problem. Others, such as myself, believe that the language problems are probably not necessary parts of cluttering. I see it as a fluency disorder affecting speech rate, prosody (e.g., stress, pauses, rhythm), articulation of multisyllabic words or phrases, and disfluencies. If you go to a typical speech-language pathologist (SLP) to see if you clutter and stutter, I'm not sure what you might be told. Most of them admit to knowing very little about cluttering. To try to find out if you clutter and stutter, you might be able to contact a member of the International Cluttering Association from their website <http://associations.missouristate.edu/ICA/> under Consumers--Find a clinician Near You. If not, you might try a fluency specialist <http://www.stutteringspecialists.org/consumers.html> or The Stuttering Foundation's Referral List <http://www.stutteringhelp.org/DeskLeftDefault.aspx?tabid=158>. If all of that fails, you might wish to contact me or one of the members of this panel offline. Maybe we could work out you sending me a videotape of yourself. I hope this helps. Ken