Saturday, August 15, 2009

Dave - Symposium on Cluttering


The symposium on Cluttering on the final afternoon was excellent. Presenters took various aspects of cluttering and so the audience got a good overall view of cluttering and its history. However, it was obvious that really very little is know about cluttering, if you think we don’t know much about stuttering, then for cluttering it’s about 100 times worse! One of the most interesting papers was by Yvonne van Zaalen from the Netherlands, which applied Levelt’s model of language production to cluttering, specifically the language monitoring aspect of the model. No-one mentioned anything about brain imaging and cluttering. The prevalence of cluttering was discussed by Ken St. Louis. This was more preliminary work than a full-blown prevalence study. However, it did highlight the relationship between cluttering and stuttering. Cluttering and stuttering do seem often to occur within the same individual, which poses an interesting problem concerning what aspect of speech is being monitored by individuals who both stutter and clutter, given that one of the points often mentioned is that people who clutter are often not aware of the problem.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Tom,

So Is cluttering a language problem or a speech problem?

(and is stuttering a speech disorder or a language based disorder?)

Or is it a language & speech disorder? Let's start with the basics, if we don't understand the basics (not sure), that is a problem.

We need a clutteringbrain blog!

Anonymous said...

Hi Dave,

What is the prevalence of cluttering cited at the presentation?

Thanks!

Ora said...

Dave - Thanks for the report. Let us know if there were any other sessions you found interesting.

Anonymous said...

What is "Cluttering"....can someone give an explanation of what it actually is?

Thx

Dave Rowley said...

For those wanting more information, The International Cluttering Association homepage is here: http://associations.missouristate.edu/ICA/

A really good introduction written by Ken St. Louis et al is here: http://www.asha.org/publications/leader/archives/2003/q4/f031118a.htm

Yvonne van Zaalen said...

Cluttering is as prevalent as stuttering. In the stuttering population 21-67% is believed to exhibit cluttering symptoms. Cluttering is a langauge based fluency disorder. In people who clutter language production is not automatised completely, resulting in a high incidence of sentence and word structure errors or normal disfluencies. These errors and disfluencies are especially present in fast speech rate and diminish in slowed rate or when a person focuses attention to speech production.

Anonymous said...

So 1% of the world clutters? How is the severity level measured?