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From: Joseph Dewey
Date: 22 Oct 2005
Time: 16:51:24 -0500
Remote Name: 24.10.194.97
Hi Tammy. Thanks very much for your question. I didn't go into this too much in my article, so I'm glad you asked this so I can elaborate on it. I think that cluttering is very interesting because it is something that everyone can relate to doing at one point or another in their lives. I actually think that most people speak with "cluttered speech" every day. At the other end of the spectrum is when cluttered speech turns into a speech disorder. The really interesting thing about cluttering as a speech disorder is that the more cluttered a person's speech is and the more diagnosable they are as a clutterer, then the more they conform to a defined personality set. I've described the personality set a little in my article, but Weiss describes it really well in his book http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0006BMD0I/ So, because I'm a "pure" clutterer, and because my personality set almost identically matches the cluttering personality set, I really see my cluttering as that my personality results in a high likelihood of disrupted speech. It's kind of a chicken or the egg question, though, because the question could be asked if the lack of organization comes because of the personality or if the personality comes because of the lack of organization. I'm not really sure, but I really like looking at it as a personality set, because you really can't change your personality, and there's been a lot of benefit for me of embracing the good things about my personality, a lot of which I learned from reading Weiss's book, and then working on my organization as a different style of doing things. I think I’ll always be a clutterer, and think in a cluttered way, but if I can learn the style of thinking with organization and speaking with organization, then it’s something that I can use when I need to speak. I also think that the cluttering personality set would follow the same 1 to 100 scale that I put in my article. I think that people who would rank as a 1 - 10 (very good public speakers) would have wide ranging personalities and that there would be very little that is similar about them. I think that people who are very severe "pure" clutterers, 90 - 100, would all fit almost exactly into the cluttering personality set and they would be extremely similar in their personalities. I think that there’s a lot of benefit to looking at cluttering as a personality, because cluttering is extremely easy to mask. For example, if all I do in a conversation is ask questions and give 3-10 word responses, my cluttering disappears for that conversation. One of the things that they say in the cluttering literature is that it is a huge challenge for the SLP to bring out cluttering in a clinical environment, because ironically that is where the person’s speech is the most fluent. However, the person’s personality remains the same when they are in the clinic, so a way that could work well is do change a lot of the diagnostic tests to test for personality rather than for disfluencies. This solution is probably years away from a practical way of performing it, but it would make sense to me that eventually this would be the best way to diagnose cluttering. Since I’ve been researching cluttering so much, something that I do now whenever I meet people is that I really look for cluttering and cluttering-like characteristics. I’ve noticed that a lot of people who I’ve met who have the cluttering personality (which seems pretty striking to me) will end up speaking with cluttered speech as I get to know them better. So, it’s been my experience that it’s easier to tell if a person has the cluttering personality than it is to determine cluttering from listening to a person’s speech. I have to add that I’m not an SLP or a researcher, so these are my observations about people rather than that this is actual research. But, I really hope that what I’m saying will motivate some actual researchers to quantify what I’m saying and to prove or disprove it. Thanks again for the question--I enjoyed it. Joseph