This article is a written transcript of the course, “Cluttering: Troubleshooting the Challenges”, presented by Kathleen Scaler Scott, Ph.D. on February 24, 2011.
This text is being provided in a rough-draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings.
Amy Hansen: Good afternoon and welcome to today's expert seminar, “Cluttering: Troubleshooting the Challenges” by Dr. Kathleen Scaler Scott. Kathleen is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Speech Language Pathology in Misericordia University and a Board Recognized Fluency Specialist and Mentor. She has been a practicing clinician for 17 years in hospital, school and private practice settings. Dr. Scaler Scott has authored and co-authored several articles and book chapters on the topic of fluency disorders and is co-editor of the forthcoming textbook Cluttering: a handbook of research, intervention and education with Dr. David Ward. Her current research projects include integrating treatment approaches, exploration of language and fluency patterns in autism spectrum disorders and examination of working memory in cluttering. She has presented numerous papers nationally and internationally in the areas of fluency disorders and social communication disorders. A certified special education and elementary school teacher, Dr. Scaler Scott is also Coordinator of the International Cluttering Association. So welcome Kathleen and thank you so much for sharing your expertise with us today.
[Applause]
>> Dr. Scott: Okay. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for this important topic. Before we begin I wanted to let you know how we're going to structure the next hour.
Introduction
As a practicing clinician, I receive numerous queries from SLPs seeking advice about their clients with cluttering in the areas of making the diagnosis, assessment and treatment and so how I decided to structure our hour together was to focus on the nine challenges that I, as a practicing clinician, have faced myself and continue to face on my caseload and those that have been brought to me as issues by clinicians who have contacted me. We'll focus on those nine issues and encourage you when you’re doing your treatment with your clients to integrate cluttering strategies into other things that you may be working on with your clients. I'm going to, in the same way, weave in information about treatment and assessment into our discussion about the nine challenge areas. So let me just let you know that because our time is short together what I will also do is provide you with resources and places to go to get further information after this program.
Challenge #1 – Is it Cluttering or Not?
So let's start with the first challenge which I think is probably one of the most critical challenges and one of the most common challenges facing SLPs and that is determining whether or not your client actually has the diagnosis of cluttering. There is a lot of confusion around this area and if you look at the history of cluttering it really makes sense as to why. Just really briefly, cluttering was first described as a central language imbalance and from that time cluttering was really looked at in a very broad based way. It’s not just speech characteristics and fluency characteristics but cluttering was looked at in terms of other possible presenting symptoms such as attention issues, learning issues and language issues. What happened as a result is the definition became so broad that it became really difficult to separate whether or not a client just had cluttering or they also had a learning disability or if what you were seeing was really cluttering or was it a pragmatic language disorder instead?
Because of that in the U.S. cluttering lost a little bit of credibility. For a long time, even though work continued in the area of cluttering in Europe, there wasn't a lot of work done here. There wasn't a lot of interest in the area of cluttering. It was not the hot topic as it has become lately. Then in the early 1990s a resurgences of interest started in the U.S. What has been happening, instead of us looking at cluttering as a broad base definition now we're really narrowing it down so we can just focus on the speech aspects and learn to be able to separate it from other possible concomitant disorders.
