What About Cluttering?
Cluttering is another speech disorder characterized by the perception of rapid and/or irregular speech rate. Speech often includes atypical pauses, overuse of filler words, collapsing or omitting syllables, and frequent phrase restarts or revisions.
According to ASHA.org, breakdowns in clarity can result from:
- atypical pauses within sentences that are not expected syntactically (e.g., “I will go to the / store and buy apples”; St. Louis & Schulte, 2011),
- deletion and/or collapsing of syllables (e.g., “I wanwatevision”),
- excessive levels of typical disfluencies (e.g., revisions, interjections),
- maze behaviors or frequent topic shifting (e.g., “I need to go to…I mean I’m out of cheese. I ran out of cheese and bread the other day while making sandwiches and now I’m out so I need to go to the store”)
- omission of word endings (e.g., “Turn the televisoff”)
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