Fluency, Stuttering, & Cluttering
What does it mean?
When fluency is an issue, a person’s clutter or stutter can impede communication. Stuttering sometimes causes low confidence, anxiety, or frustration with communication, while cluttering can impact multiple cognitive and linguistic domains.
At Kefi, our therapists skillfully treat children who stutter or clutter. We combine counseling, self-regulation, awareness training, breath work, and fluency strategies to equip children to better manage their stuttering.
Therapeutic Interventions
Treatment for fluency disorders is highly individualized and determined based on a thorough assessment of speech fluency, language factors, emotional/attitudinal components, life impact, and family values and preferences. The ultimate goal is for individuals to understand how they can manage the disfluencies and their reactions.
Stuttering, the most common fluency disorder, that interrupts the flow of speaking and is characterized by specific types of disfluencies, including:
- Repetitions of sounds, syllables, and monosyllabic words
- Prolongations of consonants when it isn’t for emphasis
- Blocks – inaudible or silent pause or inability to initiate sounds
These disfluencies may also lead to:
- Negative reactions to speaking
- Avoidance behaviors
- Escape behaviors, such as secondary mannerisms (e.g., eye blinking and head nodding or other movements of the extremities, body, or face)
- Physical tension
Children and adults who stutter also frequently experience psychological, emotional, social, and functional consequences from their stuttering, including social anxiety, a sense of loss of control, and negative thoughts or feelings about themselves or about communication. As a result, at Kefi we provide tools and strategies to support speech production as well as address psychological and emotional factors.
Cluttering is another fluency disorder. Cluttering is characterized by a fast and/or irregular speech rate, atypical pauses, social challenges, decreased awareness of moments of disfluency, many disfluencies, omitting syllables or end of words, and language formulation issues, which leads to breakdowns in speech clarity and fluency.
Cluttering may occur by itself or with stuttering.
