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From: Ken St. Louis
Date: 27 Apr 2010
Time: 17:02:13 -0500
Remote Name: 157.182.15.121
Dear Mei-tal, Thanks for the summary of your thesis. I wish it had been a full paper in this online conference with more detail. What you describe is similar to what Katrin Schulte Meile did for her dissertation in Germany. With a fairly strict definition (which might be described as nonstuttering, fluency disordered individuals with rapid rates of speech), Katrin found relatively few "pure" clutterers. From case history information about 1/3 of her group of 15 were relatively free of coexisting disorders. Still, with testing, most of her clutterers manifested some coexisting disorders. The important fact that is relevant to this discussion is that those coexisting disorder clusters were NOT THE SAME in all the clutterers. Therefore, there is no particular set of symptoms, aside from the lowest common denominator symptoms she used to select participants, that would define them all. That is precisely why I recommend the LCD definition. If I understand, you have found roughly the same phenomenon--different clusters of coexisting disorders. Of course, the way we deal with the different groups of clutterers leads us often to consider subtypes, as you seem to be suggesting. Yvonne van Zaalen talks about two types of cluttering. Thanks again. Ken