Language planning disturbances in children who clutter or have learning disabilities

The primary objective of this paper is to determine to what extent disturbances in the fluency of language production of children who clutter might be related to, or differ from difficulties in the same underlying processes of language formulation seen in children with learning disabilities. It is hypothesized that an increase in normal dysfluencies and sentence revisions in children who clutter reflect different neurolinguistic process to those of children with learning disabilities. To test this idea, 150 Dutch speaking children, aged 10;6 to 12;11 years, were divided in three groups (cluttering, learning difficulties and controls), and a range of speech and language variables were analysed. Results indicate differences in the underlying processes of language disturbances between children with cluttered speech and those with learning disabilities. Specifically, language production of children with learning disabilities was disturbed by problems at the conceptualizator and formulator stages of Levelt's language processing model, whilst language planning disturbances in children who clutter were considered to arise due to insufficient time to complete the editing phase of sentence structuring. These findings indicate that children who clutter can be differentiated from children with learning disabilities by both the number of main and secondary story plot elements and by the percentage of correct sentence structures.