Verbatim Descriptions of Cluttering
"Oh, I think I my speech is garbled. I speak too fast…Other people always say 'What did you say to me? Speak slower please'….I hear I hear myself. Uh my my words get garbled to myself I garble my words…"
(illustrating difficulties in articulation, speech intelligibility, and rate)
"It's mostly like explanation of something. Like I want to say something is I I mean to say 'it's extemporaneous,' but I can't think of the word 'extemporaneous' - I think of uh - it's something you say as it comes out of the - you can't remember - that sort of thing, y'know?"
(illustrating difficulties in language)
Example of a Cluttering "Maze"
(rambling, run-on verbalizations that add nothing to the content of the message)
"I know myself I speak and I and I know if I slow down and speak properly people will understand me… People know me used to me. They used to hear - understand it… I think since uh um since um after college it started getting worse and - worse and worse. After uh in school I went I had speech classes and so forth and I know I had uh - I used to - you used to have to record your speech and uh listen to yourself…"
Authors' Research Results
Cluttered speech
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Most common disfluency categories: unfinished words, interjections, and revisions
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Unfinished words, interjections, and revisions occur in clusters of disfluencies
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Least acceptable to listeners for speech rate and naturalness; somewhat more acceptable for articulation; most acceptable for fluency and language
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Reduced voice onset times; irregular syllable durations; severely shortened vowels; compressed consonant clusters
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Consistently more "intended" syllables (based on listener's judgments of what is being said) than "actual" syllables (based on acoustic characteristics of spectrograms). Compared to cluttered speech samples, rehearsed samples actually faster (measured acoustically).
Clutterers
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Slower than controls with diadochokinetic syllables at comfortable and fast rates; less successful at increasing speech rate after instruction to talk "even faster"
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Often aware of cluttering but unable to change it
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Faster speech rates and more cluttering symptoms in severe clutterer versus mild-moderate clutterer
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Positive response to delayed auditory feedback (DAF) therapy (severe clutterer); negative response to DAF (mild-moderate clutterer)
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Positive response to awareness, modeling, and contingent management therapy (mild-moderate clutterer)
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