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From: Klaas Bakker, Florence Myers, Ken St. Louis and Lawrence Raphael
Date: 11 Oct 2005
Time: 11:45:16 -0500
Remote Name: 146.7.150.239
A comment rather than a question. People who clutter vary in how their speech fluency is affected. In our experience the presenting clinical issues for most clutterers are centered around speech rate. The speech rate may be (a) too fast in an absolute sense (compared to norms), (b) too fast for one's speech and/or language system to handle, or (c) the rate is irregular or erratic. Problems of having an excessively fast/irregular rate can result in difficulties with speech formulation. They may show an excessive number of what are often called "normal disfluencies” or maze behaviors. Other individuals who clutter may have unclear speech due to the excessively fast rate of speech. Moreover, a number of people who clutter have stuttering mixed in with the cluttering-related behaviors, such as involuntary and effortful repetitions of relatively small parts of speech, blocks in the production of continuant sounds, laryngeal tension, or moving from one sound to another. These behaviors are not typically an aspect of the cluttering itself, but represent difficulty in the fluent production of the smaller units of speech such as speech sounds and syllables. People who stutter usually know exactly what they want to say but simply aren't able to do so.