ABSTRACT
Cluttering is an intriguing, yet fairly unknown fluency disorder. The early writing of Weiss (1964) outlined cluttering as a central language imbalance exhibiting deficits in the areas of cognition, language, pragmatics, speech, and motor skills. More recently, St. Louis, Myers, Bakker, and Raphael (2007) defined cluttering as a fluency disorder characterized by abnormally rapid and/or irregular speech rate. The authors contend that:
rate abnormalities further are manifest in one or more of the following symptoms: an excessive number of disfluencies, the majority of which are not typical of people who stutter; frequent placement of pauses and use of prosodic patterns that do not conform to syntactic and semantic constraints; and inappropriate (usually excessive) degrees of coarticulation among sounds, especially in multisyllabic words.
(St. Louis et al., 2007, pp. 299–300)