Purpose: Cluttering is known as one of the least studied research subjects in the field of speech and language therapy in Türkiye as well as in the international literature. It has been ignored by speech and language therapists due to the difficulties in determining its boundaries and defining it. The first aim of this overview is to convey information on the theoretical foundations and “working lowest common denominator (LCD) definition” of cluttering within the framework of the literature. The second goal of this review is to present a document that professionals in the field of speech and language therapy can use. The third object is to raise speech and language therapists' knowledge and understanding of the topic.
Method: The study was conducted with a traditional perspective of scanning studies. These studies were on the theoretical foundations of cluttering and the most accepted definition in the literature. The biological elements of cluttering, including the medial frontal cortex, by Alm (2011) mentioned. Language-based structure of cluttering, which was called central language imbalance by Weiss (1964), was explained in detail. Based on Levelt (1989), the Language Automatization Deficit Model by van Zaalen (2009) was expressed. Working LCD definition by St. Louis and Schulte (2011) and symptoms within the scope of this definition were also discussed. Within the limits of this review article, suggestions that speech and language therapists can benefit from were included.
Conclusion & Recommendations: According to the studies reviewed, cluttering is a fluency disorder that occurs in the linguistic and motor stages of production and negatively affects intelligibility. It has been reported that cluttering has a neurological etiology. Preverbal stages might not be well-prepared in cluttering, so it might cause either over- coarticulation problems in the phonological level of the word or excessive normal disfluencies in the syntactic structure of the message. It can be said that the speech rate of people with cluttering was too high to be met by their language systems (Scaler Scott & Ward, 2013). In addition, high and/or irregular speech rate was the obligatory, and highly normal disfluency, excessive syllable collapse, and abnormal pause, stress, and rhythm symptoms were likely to accompany the obligatory symptom within the framework of the working LCD definition. These signs of cluttering have emphasized observable behaviors of spoken language. Speech and language therapists are likely recommended to use the working LCD definition while they evaluate people with cluttering. It may also be suggested to consider its linguistic components.
Keywords
fluency disorders, cluttering, working LCD definition.
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