The Monster Study

Stuttering or childhood-onset fluency disorder is an impediment that involves frequent and significant problems with normal fluency and flow of speech. It’s normal for children to stutter when their speech and language abilities aren't developed enough to keep up with what they want to say, but most children outgrow this developmental stuttering. At 6 years old, Wendell Johnson spoke just fine, that was until one of his teachers pointed out to his parents that he might have a slight stutter. From that point on, his speech was obsessively scrutinized by his parents and they took the harsh route of trying to rectify it. But Wendell himself insisted that he had no such disorder to begin with and it was the constant persuasion by his parents that lead to him developing a chronic painful stutter. At the age of 20, he enrolled at the University of Iowa, the most famous center for stuttering research in the world. ''I became a speech pathologist because I needed one,'' he later said. While studying there, he hypothesized a very controversial yet plausible idea that stuttering is a learned behavior and wasn’t due to any underlying physiological defect. By 1939, Wendell was an assistant professor at the same university and he recruited one of his students, Mary Tudor, to undertake an experiment that would later be dubbed as ‘The Monster Study’. The nickname is apt, as experimenting on orphans is truly a monstrous endeavor and was compared to the Nazi experiments on human subjects by his colleagues when they found out about the study.

Mary Tudor was sent to the Iowa soldiers and Sailors Orphans' Home to study a sample of 22 orphans. None of them were made aware of her intentions, in fact, the stutterers among them were made to believe they were receiving free speech therapy. What her research entailed though, was to induce stammering in healthy children and to see whether telling stutterers that their speech was fine would produce a change. Among the 22 subjects, 10 were identified to have stuttering and were divided into two groups of 5 each, labeled group IA and IB. The remaining 12 children were chosen at random from the population of normally fluent orphans. Six of these were assigned to group IIA and the other six to group IIB. The children in group IA and IIB were told they were normal speakers and given compliments on their lucid enunciation. Children in group IB and IIA were told that their speech was not normal at all, that they were beginning to stutter and that they must correct this immediately. Out of these, children from group IIA were psychologically harassed to try to induce stuttering in them. They were told things along the lines of ''The staff has concluded that you have a great deal of trouble with your speech. You have many of the symptoms of a child who is beginning to stutter. You must try to stop yourself immediately. Use your willpower. Do anything to keep from stuttering. Don't ever speak unless you can do it right. You see how [the name of a child in the institution who stuttered severely] stutters, don't you? Well, he undoubtedly started this very same way.'' All in all, the experiment was a huge disaster, and even failed to verify what it set out to prove. Of the six normal children who were falsely labeled stutterers, two actually improved their speech fluency and quality of speech didn't budge for two others. Of the actual stutterers who were told they now spoke fine, two showed slight improvements in fluency, two decreased in fluency and one was unchanged. What was truly horrifying was that while the non-stuttering children of Group IIA didn’t actually develop a stutter, they began to act like stutterers. One of the boys began refusing to recite in class. Many of them became withdrawn and were terrified of speaking certain words and sounds in the fear of being judged. One of the orphans even ran away from the orphanage. They started doing poorly at school. They also shuffled their feet, whispered, snapped their fingers, gulped, gasped, and clamped their mouths shut. They spoke fine when forced to talk, but otherwise, they refused to have social interactions. The only conclusion that could be drawn was that you can teach and reinforce tics associated with stuttering but clinical stuttering is non-inducible.

The three surviving orphans from Group IIA, are each suing the State and University of Iowa for millions of dollars, for infliction of emotional distress and fraudulent misrepresentation. The estates of the three deceased orphans are also a part of the suit. Wendell himself did not support the publication of this study in any way; not because it tugged at his moral compass, but because it decisively disproved the hypothesis that he had believed his whole life. He died at the age of 59, never having shared his findings in this study with anyone and staunchly bolstering his misguided beliefs as he wrote in one of his last essays, “The child learns speech-disruptive behavior as he tries to keep from stuttering and so to gain approval.”