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From: Joseph Dewey
Date: 09 Oct 2005
Time: 17:11:20 -0500
Remote Name: 70.56.100.135
Hi Cara. Thanks very much for your question. It has taken me a long time to respond, just because I think that your question really hits on where some major future breakthroughs will be with cluttering research. Something that I think will be helpful and would be very interesting to research is what an incredibly low level most clutterers are at with certain areas that are related to music. I'm not exactly sure what those areas are, but I think that if those areas could be quantified, that they would help to advance cluttering research. I know that for me that I was very underdeveloped in the following areas until I started working on my: hearing the beat in music, dancing, varying pitch, varying intonation, varying loudness. To directly answer your question, I think that infusing an underlying music to a clutterer's speech is one of the most beneficial things to do. However, I think that most clutterers would be similar to me and would have an amazingly low level of ability to do this. With most people, you could model a sentence infused with an underlying music, and they would be able to imitate the sentence pretty quickly. With a clutterer, you'd have to break it down into smaller steps. Something that is related to this is that the clutterer (especially adult) will have learned a lot of ways of compensating, and so it might be tough to get around the compensations to work on the problem. A really good book that I've read that gave me the phrase "underlying music to speech" is Voice Power, which is listed in the references of the article. It's not a speech disorder book, but I learned a ton from it. She's got a really unique take on how speech is like music, and approaches the subject from a speech perspective rather than from a music perspective, even though she talks about the interaction between both of them.