Cluttering & Atypical Fluency Disorders

Cluttering: The Lowest Common Denominator Definition

Cluttering is a fluency disorder in which speech segments sound rapid, irregular, or both, and at least one of the following is present: excessive typical (non-stuttering-like) disfluencies, excessive collapsing or deletion of syllables, or abnormal pauses, syllable stress, or rhythm (St. Louis and Schulte, 2011). Rate is judged relative to what the speaker's own system can handle, so a person who clutters may not exceed normative words per minute yet still sounds too fast.

Features that often accompany cluttering but are not required: reduced awareness, language formulation difficulty and mazes, disorganized discourse, and co-occurring attention or learning difficulties. Cluttering and stuttering co-occur in a meaningful minority of people who stutter.