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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 10/23/01
Time: 10:50:22 AM
Remote Name: 157.182.12.51
Dear Steve,
Your question about whether or not your son clutters is a very good one. I read with interest your question to Brian Humphrey after his paper on final word disfluencies and his answer. Honestly, there is not a great deal that I would add at this point.
You might want to take a look at a paper I couauthored with Dr. Florence Myers for the first ISAD onl-line conference on cluttering. The URL is http://www.mankato.msus.edu/dept/comdis/isad/isadcon.html. This summarizes some of what we think we know about cluttering.
As to what you should do with your son, I would suggest sitting down with him at a good time when things are calm and proceed as follows. First, ask him if he is aware that he sometimes repeats the ends of words. If not, give him a simple example like you did in your question. Then, ask him if he ever did (or thinks he might) try not to repeat words like that sometimes. Next, if the conversation is still going well, you might try to set up a short session (e.g., 5 minutes) with a fun activity every other day or so wherein you remind him of final word repetitions and he tries to reduce them. You could come up with some kind of reward system for him to reduce the disfluencies once you have a sense that he knows what they are, maybe a trip to the mall, fast food restaurant, shooting some hoops, etc. If he is a typical clutterer (I do not know that he is!) and has been relatively unaware of these disfluencies, this should not be terribly aversive and should be helpful. On the other hand, if he reacts negatively to any of this, I would recommend not pursuing it any further. In either case, you should work with a qualified speech-language pathologist during this process in case you need some advice and help.
Again, I don't know if this will work or not, but I don't believe there is any danger in trying, so long as you can stay calm, supportive, and noncritical.
We have been connected via email through another contact, so I assume we will communicate further about your son. Good luck.
Ken