Cluttering

People with clutters tend to talk very fast, or have an irregular rate of speech.  Their intonation patterns can be unusual, with frequent pauses in odd places.  Sometimes there are repetitions of speech sounds, or speech sounds join together, especially in longer words.  Listening, turntaking and awareness can also be affected.  The result is that the speech can come across as muddled and difficult to understand.

The SLT can help the person with a clutter to be more aware of his speech behaviour, and to identify ways of making his speech clearer and easier to understand.  This will probably involve discussion of what he is currently doing and how he wants to change.  Audio or video recording can be helpful in increasing self monitoring.  Motor speech exercises can help in the learning of new speech skills.  A Solutions Focused approach to all this keeps therapy positive and totally relevant to the individual client.