Clutterers often have reading and writing disabilities, especially sprawling, disorderly handwriting, which poorly integrate ideas and space. Differential diagnosis Ĭluttering can often be confused with various language disorders, learning disabilities, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). It feels like 1) about twenty thoughts explode on my mind all at once, and I need to express them all, 2) that when I'm trying to make a point, that I just remembered something that I was supposed to say, so the person can understand, and I need to interrupt myself to say something that I should have said before, and 3) that I need to constantly revise the sentences that I'm working on, to get it out right. Cluttering is also characterized by slurred speech, especially dropped or distorted /r/ and /l/ sounds and monotone speech that starts loud and trails off into a murmur.Ī clutterer described the feeling associated with a clutter as: Stuttering is characterized by struggle behavior, such as overtense speech production muscles. In contrast, clutterers are most clear at the start of utterances, but their speaking rate increases and intelligibility decreases towards the end of utterances. Stutterers are usually dysfluent on initial sounds, when beginning to speak, and become more fluent towards the ends of utterances. Cluttering affects not only speech, but also thought patterns, writing, typing, and conversation. A stutterer has a coherent pattern of thoughts, but may have a difficult time vocally expressing those thoughts in contrast, a clutterer has no problem putting thoughts into words, but those thoughts become disorganized during speaking. Both communication disorders break the normal flow of speech, but they are distinct. Ĭluttering is sometimes confused with stuttering. This is especially true when the speaker is nervous, where nervous speech more closely resembles cluttering than stuttering. Cluttered speech is exhibited by normal speakers, and is often referred to as stuttering. It is also often incorrectly applied to normal dysfluency rather than dysfluency from a disorder.

Stuttering is often misapplied as a common term referring to any dysfluency. These rate abnormalities further are manifest in one or more of the following symptoms: (a) an excessive number of disfluencies, the majority of which are not typical of people with stuttering (b) the frequent placement of pauses and use of prosodic patterns that do not conform to syntactic and semantic constraints and (c) inappropriate (usually excessive) degrees of coarticulation among sounds, especially in multisyllabic words. Ĭluttering is a fluency disorder characterized by a rate that is perceived to be abnormally rapid, irregular, or both for the speaker (although measured syllable rates may not exceed normal limits). Cluttering is a speech and communication disorder that has also been described as a fluency disorder.

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