RELEVANT FINDINGS FROM THE CLINICAL HISTORY OF CLUTTERERS.

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, which 7 were men. The inclusion criteria were: complaint of fast speech rate, with damages in the communication; presence of excessive other 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 complaint, 100% reported fast speech rate and 50% reported impairments in speech intelligibility. All the AWC showed awareness of the speech difficulty 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 the 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 the childhood without apparent cause; complaints of fast speech rate and impairments in speech intelligibility; improvement of the clinical status during the years, which may be associated with an awareness of the speech difficulty and ability of self-monitoring; inappropriate articulation, prosody and writing; word-finding problems; respiratory-speech-articulatory in coordination, and presence of anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]