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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 10 Oct 2005
Time: 06:42:35 -0500
Remote Name: 195.138.141.153
Dear Niklaus, I agree wholeheartedly with Klaas about the reasons cluttering was essentially ignored in North America for a long period of time. I say "essentially ignored" because there were exceptions. You may know of Deso Weiss's book, "cluttering" which was published by Prentice-Hall in 1964. It was and still is a standard resource on the topic of cluttering. Also, Van Riper wrote a good bit about cluttering as he discussed the problem of stuttering. Another reason for North American speech-language pathologists' limited awareness of cluttering was a lack of a consistent definition of the disorder. This prevented the sort of research that Klaas mentioned. The behavioral psychology tradition was powerful in the USA and Canada, leaving little room for so-called "black box" speculations about what might be going on in a person's brain. I have worked for many years to try to bring us to a consensus about definition, a task that has proved to be very difficult. I'm glad that the days of "cluttering-does-not-really-exist" are probably over....unless history repeats itself. ;-) Ken