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From: Yvonne van Zaalen
Date: 05 May 2010
Time: 08:13:51 -0500
Remote Name: 84.81.119.196
Dear Clarice, thank you very much for your inside in the struggle you have been trough finding the right diagnosis. Can I just make one important remark about "age of onset" of cluttering. Although young children do experience cluttering symptoms they are hard to differentiate from other disorders, especially when research is addressed to tests and spontaneous speech only. In the beginning of adolescence childrens speech rates increase with 25%. Where some children could be detected before, most children with cluttering can only be detected after this jump in speech rate. Our medical system is not build to look for speech language problems when children are eleven or twelve years of age. So that makes a lot of children undetected. Before the age of eleven cluttering is often misinterpreted as a sign of ADHD: understandable but there are differences: we do notice that PWC are physically unrestless but contrary to children with ADHD PWC are only restless when talking on a too difficult language level and not when they are listening or playing; PWC are often misinterpreted by SLI: understandingly but contrary to SLI, PWC do not exhibited language problems in testsituations or writing but mostly only in running speech; PWC are misinterpreted as having APD: understandable but contrary to children with APD, PWC can discriminate between sounds, can discriminate between intelligible and unitelligible moments in their own speech and do respond to increased auditory feedback, but as Molt concluded to not have APD. As therapists we should learn to check, control and rule ever other disorder out, before we make a final diagnosis: when some things in our diagnosis do not seem to feel right: look further!! Thank you very much for sharing this story with us. Gr. Yvonne