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From: Joseph Dewey
Date: 24 Oct 2005
Time: 07:36:14 -0500
Remote Name: 67.182.228.63
Hi Cindi, thanks for the question, and I'm really glad that you asked this. I'm also really glad that your son was finally diagnosed with cluttering. I think that usually articulation is a symptom of cluttering, and so working directly on articulation is only going to be minimally helpful for a clutterer. I think that the best interaction with a group-type setting is if a clutterer can talk one-on-one to a person who stutters. This will generally slow down the clutterer and give the clutterer a better framework to talk within. I think that cluttering is so much different than the other speech disorders that a "pure" clutterer would get minimal benefit from a group setting. I'm sure there is some benefit, but I would guess that after a few sessions that there isn't much benefit. A lot of other disorders are treated with "getting rid" of the problem and learning ways to cope with the problem, and really neither of those is going to help the clutterer at all. I've probably got a lot of advice, but I do want to say that I think that it is really cool how you are helping your son. I can tell that you really want to help him with his cluttering. The biggest thing that you can do is to positively motivate him to want to improve his speech. This is really tough to do with children, and even tougher to do with a clutterer without backfiring, but if you can do this one thing, it will be the most beneficial. The other thing is that probably in another 6 months, you will know as much about cluttering as your son's SLP. You won't know as much about speech pathology, just about cluttering, so your SLP is always going to be a resource. My advice is that it will always be beneficial to keep shopping around for an SLP, because maybe the next SLP will have something that helps more. I'm really hoping that 5 years from now that there are lots of SLP's that are cluttering experts, but right now there just aren't. So my advice is to just keep looking. The other thing is that your son should stay in therapy. Cluttering sounds different than other speech disorders, so it will seem to you that your son is "cured" much earlier than he actually is. If you announce that he's "cured" too early, then the cluttering will surely creep back in because the root problem didn't get solved. Another thing is that I've used to improve my speech is to look at cluttering as that I have areas in my life that are extremely underdeveloped. I think that the healthiest way to develop those underdeveloped areas is the same way that very young children develop them, in natural ways. I'm not really sure what those extremely underdeveloped areas are, and I don't think they've really been quantified yet. I also think that there are only a few of them, so it will be hard to tell what they are, but I think that a lot of them have to do with rhythm and musicality. Hopefully that helps. Thanks for the question and good luck. Joseph