What is cluttering?
Cluttering is a fluency disorder “characterized by a perceived rapid and/or irregular speech rate, which results in breakdowns in speech clarity and/or fluency.” (ASHA, https://www.asha.org/Practice-Portal/Clinical-Topics/Childhood-Fluency-Disorders/). While stuttering is also a fluency disorder, there are several ways in which stuttering and cluttering often differ from each other.
People who stutter are typically painfully aware of their difficulty speaking, whereas people who clutter are often unaware that their speech is meaningfully different from that of other people (and may also feel frustrated that people do not understand them).
Cluttering tends to present as rapid bursts of speech that causes their words to blur together. In comparison, stuttering may be relatively stable despite the person’s rate of speech. As a result, cluttering breaks the general rhythm of a sentence, whereas stuttering breaks the rhythm of a sentence only during moments of stuttering, preserving the general rhythm of the sentence.
Stuttering is typically made up of three types of disfluencies: sound/syllable repetitions, prolongations, and blocks. These types of disfluencies are very rarely ever observed in fluent speakers. Cluttering is typically made up of non-stuttering disfluencies, the types of errors that a non-stutterer might make while nervous during a presentation (e.g. mispronunciations of words, repeating words and sentences, pauses in awkward moments to find the right word to use).
A speech-language pathologist (or speech-language therapist, depending on your jurisdiction) can help determine whether a fluency disorder is stuttering or cluttering, and assist in the construction of an appropriate treatment plan for you or your loved one.