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From: Andrea Snider
Date: 17 Apr 2010
Time: 15:42:07 -0500
Remote Name: 70.101.128.68
I was wondering if there has been any research conducted that statistically represents the incidence and/or prevalence of cluttering? My father is a person who has suffered from a communication impairment his whole life. As a child his irregular disfluency symptoms enabled the classification of him as a stutterer. Sometimes it is difficult for non-familiar speakers to understand my father’s fast speech. His speech also consists of the stuttering symptoms: repetitions, prolongations, and/or blocks. Dr. St. Louis’ article describes cluttering as “normal” disfluencies under description (a). Do “normal” disfluencies refer to the series of repetitions, prolongations, and/or blocks that are prevalent in stutterers? If these symptoms are evident in clutterers; perhaps, my father is a clutterer instead of a stutterer. The statement “There is little argument that cluttering coexists with numerous communication and other disorders, e.g., disorders of phonology, language, stuttering, central auditory processes, attention deficit and/or hyperactivity, learning, apraxia, and even the autism spectrum (e.g., St. Louis et al., 2007; Ward, 2006)” is confusing. Does this mean that cluttering does not exist with these other communication disorders? Or, does this mean that speech pathologists rarely argue that cluttering in fact coexists with these other disorders?