The Monster Study was done on 22 children that lived in an orphan home in Davenport Iowa in 1939. The study was about stuttering and was done on the children without their consent. Wendell Johnson was the creator of the study and Mary Tudor was the one who actually performed the experiment on the children. They both worked at the University of Iowa. Johnson spent his life trying to find what caused stuttering and how to fix it. He stuttered badly as a child and always wondered why. Many people made fun of him so when he started studying speech he wanted to know why he stuttered. He tested himself and found that stuttering is believed to be from your genetics. “The stuttering child is a crippled child.” This quote was spoken by Johnson because he knew that if you stutter as a child it can affect your mental state.
After the study was finished it was never published. So it went pretty unknown until 2001 when a San Jose Mercury News article came out about the experiment. The reporter who found the story was Jim Dyer. He went into more detail about the study and contacted the people who were tested that were still alive. None of them knew that they were being experimented on. There was a lawsuit that took place and the seven people that were in the “positive punishment” category (they were told that they stuttered and an unwanted stimulus was added) were awarded $925,000 from the State of Iowa for emotional and psychological scars that will last them the rest of their life.
The name Monster Study was given by people who worked at the University of Iowa in the 1940s and 1950s at the Stuttering Research Program. Some believe that it was named because Johnson’s fellow co-workers thought it was horrible that he was testing on orphaned children to see if his theory was true. Others believe it was because of what they were telling the children. Either way, Mary Tudor’s thesis was the only source of information that we know of about the experiment.
Study
The University of Iowa conducted the study which is a well known university when it comes to stuttering. [4] It is believed that Wendell Johnson created the thesis for this experiment. He was a stutterer himself and his student Mary Tudor performed the experiment. It was done at the Iowa Soldiers’ Orphans’ Home in 1939. Johnson believed that when a child stutters it is because they are told that they stutter. He thought this because when he was a child his parents told him that he stuttered.
Setup
They wanted to see if they could make children stutter that didn’t stutter and if they could make stuttering children not stutter. Johnson believed that stuttering “begins not in the child’s mouth but in the parent’s ear. “
There were four questions that the researchers were trying to answer:
- Will taking the label of ‘stutterer’ away from someone who was labeled as one affect their speech fluency?
- Will labeling someone as a ‘stutterer’ that was previously labeled as one affect their speech fluency?
- Will labeling someone as a ‘normal speaker’ that was previously labeled as one affect their speech fluency?
- Will labeling someone as a ‘stutterer’ that was previously labeled as a normal speaker affect their speech fluency?
Mary Tudor screened 256 children and she and five other graduate students acted as judges. They would listen to a pool of children speak and rate them on a scale of 1-5. 1 being poor and 5 being fluent. Twenty two children were picked from the pool and ranged in age from 5-16 years old. They and the employees at the orphanage were not told what Tudor was doing. They thought she was giving the children speech lessons. Out of the twenty-two children ten were stutterers according to their teachers and matrons at the orphanage. The other twelve were considered to be ‘normal’ speakers meaning they did not stutter.
Once the ten children that stuttered were chosen they were split into two groups.
Group IA was an experimental group. They chose five children that stuttered and would tell them that they didn’t stutter and their speech was good.
Group IB was the control group. They also chose five children that stuttered and told them that their speech was “as bad as people say” and would give them normal speech lessons.
The twelve children that did not stutter were chosen from the children that spoke ‘normal’ or were considered to speak fluent. They did have “errors” in their speech and spoke with disfluencies but were not considered to stutter. Like the previous ten they were split into two groups.
Group IIA was an experimental group. They chose six normal children and told them that their speech was bad. That they were starting to stutter and needed to fix it right away and not speak if they couldn’t speak without stuttering.
Group IIB was the control group. They chose six normal children and told them that they did not stutter. They would praise them on their speech.
Treatment
When the children first met with Tudor she tested their I.Q. and found out if they were left handed or right handed. People believed that if you were left handed and used your right hand you could stutter. Because the nerve impulses wouldn’t fire properly. Johnson did not believe this theory but told Tudor to test the children anyway. They had the children draw pictures on a chalk board and squeeze a bulb that measured how hard you could grip something. Most of the children were right handed but there were left handed children in each group. The children were given numbers during this time “Case No 15 Experimental Group IIA…”
From January to the end of May 1939 was when the study was taking place. Tudor would drive to Davenport from Iowa City and speak to each child for approximately 45 minutes. She would use a script that she had been told to use.
In her thesis she stated that when speaking to the children that stuttered and would be told that they did not stutter (IA) she said “You’ll outgrow [the stuttering], and you will be able to speak even much better than you are speaking now… Pay no attention to what others say about your speaking ability for undoubtedly they do not realize that this is only a phase. “
She told the children in group IIA that did not stutter and were told that they did “The staff has come to the conclusion 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 will power… 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. “
Clinical notes
As soon as Tudor started telling the children in IIA that they stuttered they showed signs of change. After her second meeting with Norma Jean Pugh who was 5 years old she stated “It was very difficult to get her to speak, although she spoke very freely the month before”. Another child that was in the group was 9 year old Betty Romp. “practically refuses to talk” was what was stated in her final evaluation. She would hold her hand or arm over her eyes. Hazel Potter was the oldest in her group at 15. She became “much more conscious of herself, and she talked less”. She also started snapping her fingers and interrupting herself. When asked why she said “a” so much she said “Because I’m afraid I can’t say the next word”. Why she snapped her fingers “Because I was afraid I was going to say ‘a’”.
All the children that were in Group IIA started to fall behind in school. One of the boys refused to read in front of the class. The other boy Clarence Fifer who was 11 started to correct himself when he spoke. “He stopped and told me he was going to have trouble on words before he said them”. When Tudor asked him how he knew he said that it “wouldn’t come out. Feels like it’s stuck in there”.
Mary Korlaske was the last orphan that was in group IIA. She became very withdrawn and angry. When Tudor asked her if her best friend knew about her “stuttering” she mumbled “No”. “Why not?” Korlaske just stood there moving her feet around. “I hardly ever talk to her”. She ran away from the orphanage two years later and was placed in the Industrial School for Girls. [9] Mary Korlaske was given negative speech therapy. Which caused her to pay more attention to her speech. Tudor would tell her “Take a breath before you say a word if you think you are going to stutter. Stop and start over if you stutter. Put your tongue on the roof of your mouth. Do not speak unless you can speak correctly. Watch your speech at all times. Do anything to keep from stuttering.” Korlaske showed signs of paying attention to her speech right away when Tudor began visiting the orphan home.
Many of the children that did not stutter and were given negative therapy showed signs of psychological effects. Some still have problems with their speech to this day.
Mary Tudor showed signs of being affected as well. She went back to the orphan home three times after the experiment was over to help the children. She wrote to Johnson on April 22 1940 about the children “I believe that in time they … will recover, but we certainly made a definite impression on them”. She tried to undo the damage that she had done to the children but couldn’t give them enough positive therapy.
Reaction
Wendell Johnson never published his findings on the experiment. It wasn’t known to many people except those who knew Johnson. Since so many prominent researchers visited the stuttering clinic at the University of Iowa it was an open secret. The people at the facility called it the Monster Study during the 1940s and 1950s. Johnson passed away in early 1965. An article that was published in the Journal of Fluency Disorders in 1985 stated that Johnson probably didn’t publish it because he was embarrassed by the results.
Sixty-two years after the experiment took place Jim Dyer an investigative reporter for the San Jose Mercury News found the Monster Study in the basements of the University of Iowa. He was shocked by what he read and started contacting the subjects to learn more about what happened and how it affected them. He published many articles about the study and brought it to the nations attention. By this time some of the children were dead but there were still some that lived and told Dyer what happened. When asked about his opinion on the study he states that it should never be justified no matter what time it took place. “in no way would I ever think of defending this study. In no way. It’s more than unfortunate.”
The article stated that some of the children were affected by the experiment. One woman was shocked to learn that she was part of an experiment. She never knew that she stuttered and because of what Tudor told her she became withdrawn from many things in life. Children of one of the subjects said that their parent was always quiet and was self conscious about their speech. [8] A girl that lived at the orphan home told Dyer that when Mary Tudor first came to the home she thought that Tudor was going to be her new mother. She said it was one of her best days at the home. May Korlaske did not know about the experiment or what they were doing when Dyer interviewed her. None of the other subjects knew either. Korlaske wrote a letter to Tudor after she found out about the experiment. “You destroyed my life… I could have been a scientist, an archaeologist, or even president. Instead, I became a pitiful stutterer. The kids made fun of me, my grades fell, I felt stupid. Clear into my adulthood, I still want to avoid people to this day.”
Jim Dyer also interviewed Mary Tudor about her experience and how it affected her. She was 84 years old at the time. Tudor tried to forget about the experiment but was haunted by it for the rest of her life. She said that she was told to do it and things were different back then. She said if she was given the assignment today she would not do it. When shown the letters that the children sent to her she would cry and shake. Some she couldn’t even open. She knew that what she was doing to the children was wrong but at the time you did what you were told.
Response
The University of Iowa has the “Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Clinic” that is still a major school when it comes to stuttering. After the San Jose Mercury News published their articles the University of Iowa issued an apology for the Monster Study. A representative from the University of Iowa said that although the standards were different back in 1939 that it was “regrettable under any circumstance”.
Jim Dyer and Mercury News
After publishing the articles about the Monster Study Jim Dyer quit his job at San Jose Mercury News. The Executive Officer of the paper said that Dyer was a master’s student at the University of Iowa and lied about who he was to get into the archives. The archives were not available to reporters. This was stated by an archivist named Jim Hendrickson. Hendrickson said that Dyer told him he was working on his dissertation and never said that he was a journalist. Dyer also signed a document that said he was a student of psychology. Which he was not. Hendrickson said that no reporters were allowed in the archives. But a few weeks later he corrected himself and said that it was ok for reporters to look at the sensitive information in the archives. It was too late at that point because the media already reported that the archives were closed to reporters. The San Jose Mercury News will not amend their story about the archives.
Public response
Speech pathologists
Many speech pathologists believe that the orphans’ speech and actions were negatively affected by the Monster Study. They feel that the children were negatively conditioned to stutter. Although the study was not successful, speech pathologists learned that stuttering can be learned. Which is why it has had such an impact on us today. Wendell Johnson was one of the first people to study speech and stuttering.
Ethics: A Case Study from Fluency was written in 2005 about the Monster Study. There were many speech pathologists that contributed to the book but they could not agree on if the study was ethical or not. Some felt that it was wrong to do the experiment on children that lived at an orphan home. Even though it was legal at the time. Others felt that they didn’t know it would cause harm.
Reanalysis of results
Many speech therapists believe that the study was flawed and that Tudor did not perform it correctly. There is no evidence to support Johnson’s hypothesis that “stuttering begins, not in the child’s mouth but in the parent’s ear”. Which means that stuttering is caused by a parent trying to help their child not stutter.
Paticia Zebrowski who was an assistant professor of speech pathology and audiology at the University of Iowa stated that the data from the experiment was the “largest collection of scientific information” about stuttering. She also said that Johnson was the first to talk about how a stutterers thoughts and feelings play a role in stuttering. His research still plays a big role in stuttering today.
Overall the Monster Study failed to prove that Johnson’s hypothesis was correct. There was no change in stuttering. But there was an increase in speech hesitations and interruptions that were not considered to be stuttering in Group IIA.
Criticism from stutterers
There are not many people that stutter that have commented on the Monster Study. Wendell Johnson was a stutterer and is considered to be one of the greatest stuttering researchers of all time.
Jonty Claypool was a guest on the podcast All In The Mind and is a person that stutters. He felt that the Monster Study was horrifying. Jonty Claypole is a stutterer and writer/documentary producer. He learned about the Monster Study while researching for his book “Words Fail Us.” Claypole believes that Johnson helped create what we know today about stuttering. On the podcast they discuss that although we do not use the research today it helped change the way psychologists interact with abused children. What lines will they go to in order to learn more about a subject. Claypole talks about what Mary Tudor told the children at the orphan home. “You have a great deal of trouble with your speech. The type of interruption you have is very undesirable. In fact, you are beginning to stutter. You must try to stop immediately. Use your willpower; it is absolutely necessary that you do this. Do anything to keep from chattering. Do not ever speak unless you can do it right.” He feels that this is something that should never be said to a child. Especially a child that has low self esteem. He feels that Mary Tudor never realized the impact that she could have on these children. He called her statements “chilling.”
The Monster Study was also discussed on the podcast Stutterology. They have two episodes about the study. Both Horak and McGuire stutter. They feel that the study was terrible but try to understand what Wendell Johnson was thinking. Horak believes that because Johnson recently converted to General Semantics is what sparked his interest. Since he was an adult that was afraid to speak he felt that if he told himself he didn’t stutter it would help him. [17][18] Maybe he thought that if he told the children that they didn’t stutter it would help them as well. He didn’t know the difference between stuttering and struggling to not stutter.
Horak also mentioned that what Mary Tudor told the children at the orphan home is still used today in speech therapy. The guests and Horak reference the The Lidcombe Program handbook that is used for stuttering in preschoolers. It does the same thing that Johnson and Tudor did. McGuire also talked about her experience with speech therapy and how she felt similar to some of the children at the orphan home that did not stutter.
Defense of Johnson
Wendell Johnson was defended by many people. Even the University of Iowa when they issued an apology they said not to defame Johnson because of the study. [10] Most of the people that criticize the Monster Study mention that Johnson and Mary Tudor did not mean to harm the children. Many articles that were written about Johnson after 2001 mention the Monster Study but don’t focus on it.
Wendell Johnson’s son Nicholas Johnson has spoken out about his father. He and other speech pathologists have stated that Johnson did not mean to harm the children. No child was considered to be a “stutterer” at the end of the study. Johnson believes that the study was acceptable during that time and wasn’t discovered until many years later. When it was found people judged it by today’s standards. In his paper “Retroactive ethical judgments and human subjects research: The 1939 Tudor study in context [Conference paper]. Symposium on Ethics and the Tudor Study” he talks about being fair and looking at the study the way it was 63 years ago. Johnson says that no harm was done to the children by “instilling chronic stuttering”. He says that there is no proof that Johnson or Tudor intended to harm the children. He compares it to other studies that were done that harmed the patients and how there is proof that they intended to harm them. Such as the Tuskegee syphilis study.
The University of Iowa still has a building that is named after Wendell Johnson. There were many studies that were done around this time that included orphans. They did not think that they were harming the children physically. Lobotomies were being performed on people that were mentally ill and believed to help them. Today we know that they did not help and are considered unethical. “The use of vulnerable institutionalized children for exploratory procedures, investigative treatments, and experimental preventives was common in the 1920s.” This quote is from the chapter Eugenics and the Devaluing of Children. It goes into more detail about why researchers wanted to use children that were at institutions. They believed that they could learn more about social problems and medical issues. No one that was in charge of the children complained about the research being done. This is why the Monster Study was considered ok during that time period.
Lawsuit
The children that survived and family members of those that died filed a lawsuit against the State of Iowa. The State of Iowa tried to get the lawsuit dropped but the Supreme Court of Iowa denied their request in September 2005.
The orphans that testified said that they were harmed from the Monster Study. The only witness that was there was Mary Tudor. She gave a deposition on November 19 2002. Because the orphans that were on the plaintiffs side were elderly they reached a settlement with the state of Iowa.
We hope and believe that for our plaintiffs it will provide some closure to events that took place many years ago and allow them to put these memories that date back nearly 70 years behind them. For everyone it will bring an end to long, arduous and expensive litigation that would only cost more money and delay resolution to our plaintiffs who are in their 70’s and 80’s.
The seven children were awarded $925,000 from the State of Iowa on August 17 2007. They were scarred for life after being tortured for six months at the University of Iowa experiment. They found out that none of the children became stutterers but some became self conscious about their speech.
Ethics in studies
The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association will not allow studies to be done on children if there is a possibility of them being harmed in the long term.
Due to the harm that has been done to children and psychological effects that have happened from studies people have become more concerned about testing on children. Most studies were performed on adults so Congress has decided to give researchers that study children an incentive. They will be able to have their drug or service protected for a longer amount of time. This allows researchers to study children and not cause harm like we saw in the past. There must be a valid reason to put children at risk for a study. Most studies that include children only put them at a slight risk above minimal. With Wendell Johnson there was no benefit to the children and was only put at risk to satisfy his curiosity about stuttering.
Informed consent was put into place in the National Research Act of 1974. There were many unethical studies that were performed on humans which lead to the National Research Act of 1974 being created. Federal laws and guidelines were put into place to make sure that human research was being done ethically. The National Research Act created the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research. They would determine what ethical principles should be used when doing human research. The National Research Act would cover areas such as: What are the differences between medical research and medical practice? What are the risks and benefits? What guidelines should be used when doing research? And how to obtain informed consent. The National Research Act of 1974 lead to the Belmont Report which identified children as a vulnerable population. More precautions need to be taken when doing research on children and assessing the risks that they may face.
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