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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 10/7/02
Time: 10:09:35 AM
Remote Name: 157.182.12.205
Dear Wirbah,
Good question. "Cluttering" (in English) is a rather unfortunate term. Aside from rhyming with "stuttering," it really means what the dictionary says--and that is *not* how we use it in reference to a fluency disorder.
Probably the biggest reason that cluttering is not widely recognized and accepted, even by SLPs, is that most of the authorities define it differently. Let me give you an example, Dale's excellent response starts out talking about language problems. Most clutterers do manifest language difficulties, but not all of them. That is why my work has focused on coming up the the "lowest common denominator" for cluttering. For the past 15 years I have proposed a "working definition" for cluttering as follows: a fluency disorder that is not stuttering accompanied by a rapid and/or irregular speaking rate. Recently, in an ongoing study of stuttering with colleagues (Florence Myers, Larry Raphael, and Klaas Bakker), we have modified the working definition as follows.
"Cluttering is a syndrome characterized by a speech delivery rate which is either abnormally fast, irregular, or both. In cluttered speech, the person’s speech is affected by one or more of the following: (1) failure to maintain normally expected sound, syllable, phrase and pausing patterns; (2) evidence of greater than expected levels of disfluency, the majority of which are unlike those typical of people who stutter." This definition focuses on the importance of speech rate problems and recognizes that the result of those might manifest themselves in articulatory as well as fluency dimensions.
We hope to make some inroads in generating a defensible definition that will be more widely accepted.
Ken