Fluency Disorders

Fluency refers to speech that flows in a rhythmic, smooth manner. Dysfluencies are disruptions or breaks in the smooth flow of speech. All speakers experience some normal dysfluencies.

A fluency disorder is an excessive amount of dysfluencies in one's speech. A client may produce excessive repetitions (part-word, whole-word, or phrase), prolongations, interjections, silent pauses, broken words, incomplete phrases, and/or revisions. In addition to these speech characteristics of dysfluencies, there are often associated motor behaviors that occur during dysfluent speech. Associated motor behaviors may include eye blinking, wrinkling the forehead, moving the head, clenching the teeth, pursing the lips, etc.

The most common fluency disorders are stuttering and cluttering.

Stuttering is diagnosed when there is a high percentage of dysfluencies, the duration of dysfluencies are 1 second or longer, and there is a presence of associated motor behaviors.

Cluttering occurs when there is excessive speech rate and some of the following characteristics: monotone voice, "mumbling" speech, sounds transposed in a word, phrase, or sentence (i.e. "hit the books" becomes "bit the hooks"), compressed errors (i.e. "refrigerator" becomes "reor"), language deficiencies, auditory processing difficulties, and/or unawareness of speech difficulties.