PURPOSE:
to characterize the relevant findings of the clinical history of adults who clutter.
METHODS:
participants were 8 adults who clutter (AWC), with ages between 8 and 39 years old, and 7 were men. The inclusion criteria were: complaint of fast speech rate, with damages in the communication; presence of excessive common disfluencies; score above 120 in the Predictive Cluttering Inventory. Data were gathered by clinical and familial history, assessment of fluency and Predictive Cluttering Inventory.
RESULTS:
the familial history was positive for fluency disorders for all subjects, whereas 3 for cluttering and 5 for stuttering. According to the complaints, 100% reported fast speech rate and 50% reported impairments in speech intelligibility. All the AWC showed speech difficulty awareness and presented some strategy of self-monitoring. Information about language - cognition showed that the majority of the adults reported word-finding problems, excessive revisions, interjections/fillers and hesitations in speech.
CONCLUSION:
the main findings of the clinical history from AWC were: positive familial history for fluency disorders; the beginning of the manifestations was in childhood without apparent cause; complaints of fast speech rate and impairments in speech intelligibility; improvement of the clinical status throughout the years, which may be associated with speech difficulty awareness and ability of self-monitoring; inappropriate articulation, prosody and writing; word-finding problems; respiratory-speech articulatory incoordination, and presence of anxiety.
Speech, Language and Hearing Sciences; Speech; Diagnosis; Speech Disorders; Anamnesis
