For Speech Language Pathologists

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Introduction

Neurogenic stuttering is a type of fluency disorder in which a person has difficulty in producing speech in a normal, smooth fashion. Individuals with fluency disorders may have speech that sounds fragmented or halting, with frequent interruptions and difficulty producing words without effort or struggle. Neurogenic stuttering typically appears following some sort of injury or disease to the central nervous system i.e. the brain and spinal cord, including cortex, subcortex, cerebellar, and even the neural pathway regions. These injuries or diseases include:

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Like stuttering, cluttering is a fluency disorder, but the two disorders are not the same. Cluttering involves excessive breaks in the normal flow of speech that seem to result from disorganized speech planning, talking too fast or in spurts, or simply being unsure of what one wants to say. By contrast, the person who stutters typically knows exactly what he or she wants to say but is temporarily unable to say it. To make matters even more confusing, since cluttering is not well known, many who clutter are described by themselves or others as "stuttering." Also, and equally confusing, cluttering often occurs along with stuttering.

Within the field of speech-language pathology and even among those who stutter, there is disagreement about acceptable treatment outcomes from stuttering therapy. Some believe the only acceptable therapy outcome is a significant reduction in or total elimination of stuttering. Others believe that speech which contains some stuttering, as long as the stuttering has become less tense and effortful, is just as acceptable.