What are Fluency Disorder?
What are common fluency disorders in kids? How is stuttering diagnosed? How does speech therapy address fluency? For children who struggle with fluency, or the flow of speaking, speech therapy can be an invaluable support, helping them increase their ability to be heard and understood by those around them.
The most common fluency disorders are stuttering and cluttering — and this article will explain how speech therapy helps children with these conditions build confidence in their communication skills!
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What is Stuttering?
Stuttering is an interruption to the flow of a conversation. There are a number of ways in which this disfluency presents itself, however, it often manifests in repetition or syllables or words. Children with a stutter may also actively try to avoid their disfluency by expressing discomfort with public reading, group discussions and more.
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What is Cluttering?
Cluttering is when a child speaks at a rate that is perceived as overly-fast or disorganized by conversational partners. These children may also exhibit frequent and irregular patterns of pausing. Many with this fluency disorder are aware that others have difficulty understanding them, and may actively avoid conversation.
Signs & Symptoms
Signs of stuttering can vary for individual children, but might include:
- Mono (single)-syllibic repetition — (“Wh-Wh-Where is my jacket?”)
- Part-word or syllable repetition — (“This is my p-p-pail”)
- Prolongation of sounds — (“Ssssssssometimes we go out.”)
- “Blocking”, or the inability to initiate a sound
- Production of words with an excess of tension or struggle.
Children with a “cluttering” disorder may exhibit some of these symptoms:
- maze behaviors or frequent topic shifting (e.g., “I need to go to . . . I mean I’m out of cheese. I ran out of cheese and bread the other day while making sandwiches and now I’m out so I need to go to the store”);
- unusual prosody, often due to atypical pauses in speech;
- omission of word endings (e.g., “Turn the televisoff”); and/or
- deletion and/or collapsing of syllables (e.g., “I wanwatevision” (want to watch television)).
Wondering About Developmental Milestones?
Have questions about your child’s development, or wondering if a certain diagnosis may be a fit? Try out our developmental screening tool— it’s a fast, free way to get a snapshot of your child’s progress on his or her developmental milestones.