Monster Study

The Monster Study was a stuttering experiment performed on 22 orphan children in Davenport, Iowa in 1939. It was conducted by Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa. Graduate student Mary Tudor conducted the experiment under Johnson's supervision. Half of the children received positive speech therapy, praising the fluency of their speech, and the other half, negative speech therapy, belittling the children for speech imperfections. 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.

It was dubbed the "Monster Study" as some of Johnson's peers were horrified that he would experiment on orphan children to confirm a hypothesis. The experiment was kept hidden for fear Johnson's reputation would be tarnished in the wake of human experiments conducted by the Nazis during World War II. Because the results of the study were never published in any peer-reviewed journal, Tudor's thesis is the only official record of the details of the experiment.

The University of Iowa publicly apologized for the Monster Study in 2001. However, Patricia Zebrowski, University of Iowa assistant professor of speech pathology and audiology notes that the data that resulted from the experiment is the "largest collection of scientific information" on the phenomenon of stuttering and that Johnson's work was the first to discuss the importance of the stutterer's thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings, and continues to largely influence views on stuttering.

The research began with selection of twenty-two subjects from a veterans' orphanage in Iowa. None were told the intent of her research, and they believed that they were to receive speech therapy. Tudor was trying to induce stuttering in healthy children and to see whether telling stutterers that their speech was fine would produce a change. Included among the twenty-two subjects were ten orphans whom teachers and matrons had marked as stutterers before the study began. Tudor and five other graduate students who agreed to serve as judges listened to each of the children speak, graded them on a scale from 1 (poor) to 5 (fluent) and concurred with the school's assessment. Five were assigned to Group IA, the experimental set, and would be told that their speech was fine. The five in Group IB, the control group, would be told that their speech is "as bad as people say".

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