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From: Klaas Bakker
Date: 22 Oct 2005
Time: 12:05:33 -0500
Remote Name: 12.214.28.114
Alan, a great question. The incidence of cluttering has not been formally determined and of course depends on available criteria for determining who should be considered clutterer. Informal estimates exist but vary widely. In order to fully understand how many clients clutter, or cluttering in addition to other speech fluency related problems (e.g., stuttering), requires an agreed definition that is empirically supported by research. Interestingly, the number of informal reports about cluttering in children less than 10 years of age is relatively small. Nevertheless, the severity of the symptoms in some adult clutterers suggest that noticeable problems at earlier ages should have existed but maybe weren't picked up by the system. I have no research based explanation, but am suspicious about several possibilities: (1) perhaps they are not consistenly picked up by the system because of a lack of familiarity with cluttering symptoms among many school age oriented speech language pathologists (after all we are talking about a disorder that only recently has begun to draw significant attention), (2) perhaps speech at younger ages doesn't provoke cluttering symptoms as much as speech produced by adults (for example, young children speak more slowly than do adults), (3) perhaps most (normally fluent) children produce more of the behaviors that overlap with the clinical profile of cluttering than adults (e.g., an increased number of normal disfluencies). These are just possibilities, and certainly there may be more logical explanations all of which await empirical support.