This article presents the highlights of an International Cluttering Association (ICA) international initiative featuring ten experts in fluency disorders from various countries, describing the historical and current state of awareness, research, diagnosis, and treatment of cluttering across countries and continents. In addition, authors discuss the challenges facing people with cluttering and ways of overcoming them in developed and developing countries.
Naturally produced fast speech reduces certain acoustic-phonetic features that may limit intelligibility relative to linear time compression. However, how reduction affects judgments of speaking rate has not been systematically investigated. The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of linear time compression and spectral reduction on judgments of speaking rate. Listeners provided speech rate judgments of sentences. Conditions compared rate perceptions for naturally spoken sentences at slow and fast rates with linearly time-compressed/expanded versions of the same sentence, matched for duration. Conditions also examined rate judgments for noise vocoded sentences that varied in intelligibility and signal-correlated noise that examined rate judgments based only on temporal acoustic features. Our preliminary results demonstrate that linear time-compressed/expanded sentences were judged as faster than naturally produced sentences. This difference was also found for noise-vocoded versions of the sentences, as well as for signal-correlated noise. Additionally, vocoded stimuli were perceived as faster than naturally produced stimuli. These preliminary results suggest that acoustic-phonetic reductions in naturally produced speech do not appear to increase the perceived speaking rate relative to linear time manipulations. Significantly, temporal properties of speech rhythm appear responsible for coding perceptual aspects of speaking rate independently from factors related to linguistic processing.
This article is designed to call attention to the experiences of being a parent of a child who clutters. Three parents were interviewed. Although their stories are very different, they share similar challenges. Difficulties include struggling to understand a child who clutters, obtaining an initial diagnosis of cluttering, finding a speech-language pathologist with the knowledge and skills to work with a child who clutters, and helping a child with cluttering learn how to socialize with his/her peers.
Purpose: Cluttering is a fluency disorder that has been noted clinically in individuals with fragile X syndrome (FXS). Yet, cluttering has not been systematically characterized in this population, hindering identification and intervention efforts. This study examined the rates of cluttering in male young adults with FXS using expert clinical opinion, the alignment between expert clinical opinion and objectively quantified features of cluttering from language transcripts, and the association between cluttering and aspects of the FXS phenotype. Method: Thirty-six men with FXS (aged 18–26 years; M = 22, SD = 2.35) contributed language samples and completed measures of nonverbal cognition, autism symptoms, anxiety, and symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The presence of cluttering was determined by the consensus of two clinical experts in fluency disorders based on characteristics exhibited in the language sample. Cluttering features (speech rate, disfluencies, etc.) were also objectively quantified from the language transcripts. Results: Clinical experts determined that 50% of participants met the criteria for a cluttering diagnosis. Phrase repetitions were the most salient feature that distinguished individuals who cluttered. Although the presence of cluttering was not associated with autism symptoms or mean length of utterance, cluttering was more likely to occur when nonverbal cognitive ability was higher, ADHD symptoms were elevated, and anxiety symptoms were low. Conclusions: Half of the male young adults with FXS exhibited cluttering, which supports FXS as a genetic diagnosis that is highly enriched for risk of cluttering. Cluttering was associated with increased ADHD symptoms and cognitive ability and reduced anxiety symptoms. This study contributes a new description of the clinical presentation of cluttering in men with FXS and may lead to improved understanding of the potential underlying mechanisms of cluttering and eventual refinements to treatment and diagnosis.
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