We know that the underlying causes of stuttering are genetic disorders or disorders acquired after a trauma. We weren’t so sure 80 years ago. The scientific experiments that made us sure were goosebumps.
The problem of stuttering, which especially attracted great attention from the field of psychology, was the subject of an experiment carried out in 1939.
The biggest problem with the experiment was that 22 children who were completely oblivious were the subjects:
Speech specialist Wendell Johnson was a child who had speech problems and struggled with stuttering. “I became a speech expert because I needed a speech expert,” he said in a statement.
Wendell Johnson and graduate student Mary Tudor wondered what caused stuttering in 1939. They stated that they would cure 22 orphan children they chose for this purpose with speech therapy. At this stage, everyone, including the children, was unaware of what was going to happen.
The aim was therapy, but the application was not very heartwarming:
Speech therapies were normally processes aimed at putting the participants at ease. Mary Tudor’s experiment took place quite far from the word “relief”.
Tudor wanted to uncover stuttering in children without speech problems. He also wondered how good it would be to tell stuttering kids that it’s okay.
Among the 22 children, 10 stuttering children with speech disabilities were immediately identified. Tudor and his five colleagues listened to each child’s speech and rated their speaking ability from 1 (poor) to 5 (fluent).
The 10 children who stuttered were divided into two groups. The first group, IA, was called the ‘experimental group’ and the children were given the “You do not stutter” directive. The second group IB was the control group. The children in this group were told, “Yes, your speech is as bad as people say.”
The remaining 12 children were divided into two groups. Six children were included in group IIA. This group went down in history as the most controversial and unethical group. Children in this group were between the ages of 5 and 15.
Children with no speech disorders were told that their speech was completely faulty and needed to be corrected immediately:
The children in the last group, IIB, were not told about any speech disorders and were complimented on how well they spoke.
The experiment lasted from January 1939 to the end of May. Tudor spoke to the children for 45 minutes each week. In his thesis, he says to stuttering children, “You will get over your stuttering and you will speak much better than you can now. He wrote that “don’t listen to those who say you can’t speak,” but none of this was true.
To the children in the IIA group who did not stutter and were described as ‘stutterers’, Tudor said:
“Our team has concluded that you have severe speech disorders. You need to stop this immediately. Use your will… Do whatever it takes not to stutter… If you can’t talk without stuttering, don’t. You see how other kids stutter, right? They were the same in the beginning. ”
These words were like slaps to innocent children:
After this brutal indoctrination, some children refused to speak directly. They also failed in their school.
Commenting on the experiment, Tudor said, “At the time… I believed the children would get better, but we had a terrible effect on them.”
The changes in the results of the experiment of the children in the IIA group are still among the topics discussed. It has been proven that when children who do not have any speech disorders are told that they stutter, children lose their self-confidence and have difficulties in speaking.
In addition to these findings, it was also among the results of the study that speech problems were not prevented when the children who stuttered were told that they could not stutter.
This experiment, carried out in 1939, was the subject of many lawsuits. The US state of Iowa, which is normally required to pay a fine of $13.5 million, covered up this inhuman experiment by paying a sum of $925,000.
We have come to the end of this week’s psychological experiment post. You can find other contents of our column below:
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