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From: René Stes - Brecht/Antwerp - Belgium
Date: 10/8/02
Time: 4:03:35 AM
Remote Name: 213.224.83.174
Dear Wirbah, Dear Kenneth ...,
... an excellent and up-to-date "operational definition for cluttering" from Prof. Kenneth St. Louis (and also many thanks for his "excellent research-work" on this complex disorder!.)! (cluttering: we call it in our Dutch language "broddelen").
Cluttering is not so rare; it is a fascinating but often neglected - in my experience - "type of fluency disorder". And ... all different types of fluency disorders are very difficult to define.
The problems are ... - that there are no exclusive - single - stand-alone - signs ...(for normal fluent speech, for stuttering, cluttering, speech anxiety ... ), and ... as a consequence ... - that in many discussions,/ publications/reseach ... stuttering, cluttering and other types of fluency disorders are not differentiated and are called "stuttering" (sometines they are called "types of stuttering"), and that it is always difficult to define a behavior - speech/language - "disorder" (there is a continuity in the skills for fluency [timing, effort, forward flow ... in language/speech - articulation, voice]) and the dicions for "a behavior disoder" is always based on certain social acts, and thus ... based on social "judges").
To Prof. Kenneth St. Louis, and to our colleagues: can we - for the operational diagnosis of cluttering - further agree and define how much disrupted patterns (% ?), which one ... we need to count (as we do for the diagnosis of stuttering)? To aid in the evaluation we use at this time the Daly's Checklist for Possible Cluttering (David Daly & Michelle Burnett - Michigan, 1999) and as criterion, score > 55, but it is just a start ... based on a "checklist".
Best wishes and success of this excellent panel!
René Stes, Brecht/Antwerp - Belgium