Esp! I'm sending glee related asks (and I can send you one too : ) ) But I thought I'd ask, SLPA-to-SLP, what was the most niche or relatively unknown communication or speech disorder you learned about?
I think cluttering is pretty niche, even if it isn’t extraordinarily rare (1-2% in the school-age population). While nearly everyone has heard of stuttering, cluttering is quite unknown. Not to someone in our field, of course, but I think very few people outside the speech world have heard of it. I’ve never personally worked with someone diagnosed with cluttering but I did have one kid I saw early in my training that in retrospect I think may have had it. While stuttering is characterized by “less typical” disfluencies such as prolongations, blocks, and sound/syllable/word repetitions, cluttering is characterized by rapid rate of speech and omission of syllables. For example, someone with cluttering might say “I wanwatevision” rather than “I want to watch television.”
Most of the truly rare things I’ve encountered have been genetic or neurological conditions that affect communication but are not themselves communication disorders. I had a student with tuberous sclerosis which is a rare genetic disorder present in .01% of the population which causes benign tumors to form all over the body, which leads to a wide range of difficulties. My former student has tumors growing in his brain so he had significant learning and language challenges.
