Wendall Johnson's Stuttering Experiments

[David Morris]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Johnson

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Monster_Study

*The Monster Study* is the name given to a
stuttering<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuttering> experiment
performed on twenty-two orphan children in Davenport,
Iowa<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davenport,_Iowa> in
1939. It was conducted by Wendell
Johnson<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendell_Johnson> at
the University of Iowa <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Iowa>.
Johnson chose one of his graduate students, Mary
Tudor<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mary_Tudor_(researcher)&action=edit&redlink=1>,
to conduct the experiment and he supervised her research. After placing the
children in control and experimental groups, Tudor gave positive speech
therapy to half of the children, praising the fluency of their speech, and
negative speech therapy to the other half, belittling the children for
every speech imperfection and telling them they were stutterers. Many of
the normal speaking orphan children who received negative therapy in the
experiment suffered negative psychological effects and some retained speech
problems for the rest of their lives. Dubbed "The Monster Study" by some of
Johnson's peers, who were horrified that he would experiment on orphan
children to prove a hypothesis, the experiment was kept hidden for fear
Johnson's reputation would be tarnished in the wake of human
experiments<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_experiments>conducted
by the Nazis during World War II <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II>.
The University of Iowa publicly apologized for the Monster Study in 2001.
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