Monster Study – Wikipedia

The Monster Study It was an experiment on stuttering, carried out on 22 orphaned children in Davenport (USA) in 1939. It was conducted by Dr. Wendell Johnson, one of the most famous American psychologists, specialist in language pathologies, at the University of Iowa.

The study was broadcast, Johnson chose one of his students, Mary Tudor, to conduct the experiment and supervised his research. After putting the children in the control and experimental groups, Mary Tudor added a language therapy with positive suggestions in half of the children, praising the fluency of their language, and a language therapy with negative suggestions to the other half, diminishing Children for every imperfection and telling them that they were stutterers. Many of the children who received negative therapy suffered from negative psychological effects, and some had language problems for the rest of their lives.

The nickname Monster Study He was assigned by some colleagues of Johnson, who had remained upset that he experimented on orphaned children to check a theory on the genesis of stuttering. The experiment was kept hidden for fear that Johnson’s reputation could be clouded in the wake of human experiments conducted by the Nazis during the Second World War. Subsequently the University publicly apologized for the Monster Study in 2001.

The study began with the selection of 22 subjects from an orphanage of veterans in Iowa. Nobody was told the intent of Mary’s research: the children believed that they would receive speech therapy therapy. The study project was complex. Tudor was trying to induce stuttering in healthy children and also wanted to understand if telling a stutterer that his language was perfect would have produced a change. Among the 22 subjects there were 10 orphans that teachers and nurses had indicated as stutterers before the study began. Mary Tudor and 5 other graduates, who had agreed to work in the study as “judges”, listened to the languages ​​of each child, classifying them based on a scale that went from 1 (deficit language) to 5 (flowing language). Five were assigned to group IA, the experimental group: they were told that they did not stammer and that their language was excellent (positive suggestion). At the five of the IB group (control group) it was said that their language was bad (negative suggestion).

The remaining 12 children were chosen at random by the population of orphans without communication problems. Six of them were assigned to the IIA group: these children, belonging to a range aged between 5 and 15 years, was said that their language was not entirely normal, and that they would become stutterers if they had not corrected immediately . The latest subjects of group IIB, of the same age as those of the IIA group, normally spoke and were treated correctly: their way of expressing themselves was often praised. In his first visit Marie Tudor testified the Qi of each child and studied the prevalence of use of the right or left hand. In fact, an in vogue theory claimed that stuttering was due to a imbalance between the two cerebral hemispheres. According to Johnson this theory was senseless, but wanted to deepen and suggested to Tudor to observe with which hand the children wrote. She made them draw on the blackboard, but no correlation was found between the prevalence of the use of the right or left hand and the language of the subjects.

The experimental period lasted from January to May 1939: what Tudor had to do was to go to Davenport to Iowa City every 2-3 weeks, and talk to each child for about 45 minutes, following an previously agreed script. In his dissertation he said that, during the sessions with every young stuttering of the IIB group, he reassured the children, saying: “You will exceed stuttering and you will be able to speak even better than you do now. Don’t pay attention to what others say on you on As you speak: they, without a doubt, do not understand that it is only a phase “(positive suggestion). To the non -stuttering young people of the IIa class, who had been labeled as stutterers, instead he said: “The staff came to the conclusion that your language is at risk: there are many of the symptoms of a child who is about to become a stutterer. You have to try to stop Immediately. Use your willpower. You do anything to keep you from stammering. Don’t talk to anyone until I give you permission. You have noticed as a stammer (I quote the name of a child of the orphanage, who stammers a lot) , right? Well, he undoubtedly started in the same way “(negative suggestion).

The children of the IIa class immediately showed changes: after the second session with Jean’s standard, 5 years old, Tudor noted: “It was very difficult to make her speak, although it spoke very quickly until the month before.” Another of the group, Betty Romp, 9 years old, “practically refused to speak: she kept her hands or arms on the eyes most of the time”. Hazel Potter, fifteen years old, the oldest of the group, became “much more conscious than herself and began to speak less”, he noted Tudor. The Potter also began to use inter -market and snapped the fingers for frustration. He was asked why he said ‘to’ so frequently. “Because I’m afraid of not being able to say the next word.” “Why do you snap your fingers?” “Because I’m afraid of being about to say ‘a’.” The school performance of the children was very affected: one of them began to refuse to act in the classroom; Another, the eleven year old Clarence Fifer, began to correct himself anxiously. “He stopped and told me that he was par, he was having problems with words before telling them,” Tudor reported. She asked him how he knew. He replied that the sound “could not come out. He felt he was caught inside”. The sixth orphaned, Mary Korlaske, grew isolated and touchy. During their session, Tudor asked her if her best friend knew of her stammering. Korlaske whispered: “No.” “Why not?” Korlaske rubbed his feet between them. “I speak little with her.” Two years later he ran away from the orphanage and arrived at the Industrial School for Girls, thus fleeing the experiments that were conducted on her.

Mary Tudor herself was not impassive to all this. Three times, after the experiment was officially finished, she returned to the orphanage to try an additional voluntary care. He said to the children of the IIA class that they would no longer stammer. The success of this operation was questionable. He wrote to Johnson about the orphans, in a letter dated April 22, 1940, in which Tudor was slightly on the defensive: “I believe that over time they will be able to recover, but we certainly had a precise effect on them”. ^[first] Before his death Marie Tudor expressed deep regret for his role in Monster Study . Despite what caused Wendell Johnson with Monster Study , Tudor still thought that he had made many positive contributions to stuttering research.

On August 17, 2007, six of the orphaned children were compensated 925 000 $ from the state of Iowa for permanent psychological and emotional damage, caused by six months of torments. The study showed that although none of the children became stutterer, many became introverted and reluctant to speak. ^[2] The lawsuit was a consequence of an article of the San Jose Mercury News In 2001, conducted by an investigative reporter. The article revealed that several orphans had long -lasting psychological effects deriving from the experiment. The state has tried without success to obtain the abandonment of the lawsuit, but in September 2005, the judges of the Supreme Court of Iowa agreed with the Court of the Court, in rejecting the affirmation of the state of immunity and the petition for the postponement of the lawsuit.

Many of the orphans testified that they had damage from Monster Study But, outside of Mary Tudor, who witnessed a deposition of November 19, 2002, there was no eye witness of the events. The advanced age of the three former orphaned lawsuits contributed to accelerating an agreement with the state. The office of the prosecutor General of Iowa said in a press release on August 17, 2007, that the compensation of 925 000 $ It was right and appropriate, even if the state refused to accept responsibility for any damage caused to orphans.

Despite the agreement, the dispute remained on how much damage the Monster Study to orphans. Nicholas Johnson, the son of the late Wendell Johnson, defended his father vehemence. He and some language specialists claimed that Wendell Johnson did not want to create damage to orphaned children and that none of the orphans was actually diagnosed as “stutterer” at the end of the experiment. Other language experts condemned the experiment and said that the language and behavior of the orphans was suffering from the negative conditioning that I received. The letters between Mary Tudor and Wendell Johnson who were written immediately after the experiment, shows that the language of children quickly deteriorated. Mary Tudor returned to the orphanage three times to try to reverse the negative effects caused by the experiment, but complained that it was unable to provide sufficient positive therapy to reverse deleterious effects. ^[3] .

Patricia Zebrowski, associate professor of pathology of the language of the University of Iowa, notes that “the set of data that result from Johnson’s work with stutterers and their parents, is still the largest collection of scientific information as regards The onset of stuttering. Although new works have determined that children who stammer are doing something different in their language production, compared to those who do not stammer, Johnson was the first to talk about the importance of thoughts, attitudes, belief and Internal sensations of the stutterers. We still do not know what causes stuttering, but the way of approaching the study and treatment of “Iowa” is still deeply influenced by Johnson, but with an addition emphasis on the production of language. ”

Currently the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association forbids experiments on children, where there is a significant possibility of causing harmful lasting consequences. However, it may be incorrect to judge the work through the formal ethical standards that were created later. The negative consequences of this study appear minors when compared with ethical violations in research with human subjects, conducted in the second half of the twentieth century. The latter cases, approved, revised and financed, by the major research institutions, sometimes ended with the death of the subject. ^{[ without source ] [4]}

The study was suppressed, in the sense that Wendell Johnson did not attempt to continue the publication of his results, on the advice of colleagues who warned him that the experiment could obscure his career. However, the thesis was bound, cataloged and made available in the university library in the hydntic manner of the other theses. Currently there is no shared theory on stuttering, both as regards the causes and therapy. This statement is consistent with what is attributed to Patricia Zebrowski, above.

In 2001 the University of Iowa publicly apologized for the Monster Study . A spokesman for the university defined the regrettable experiment, and added: ” This is a study that should never be considered defensible in any era… In no way would I ever think of defending this study. In no way. It’s more than unfortunate “(In Italian:” This is a study that should not be considered defensible in any era. In no way I could think of defending this study. In no way. It is to be considered something more than an unhappy experiment “).