Wendell Johnson
Encyclopedia
Dr. Wendell Johnson was an American
psychologist
, speech pathologist and author and was a proponent of General Semantics
(or GS). He was born in Roxbury, Kansas
and died in Iowa City, Iowa
. The Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center, part of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics is named after this scientific pioneer. He is known for the experiment nicknamed "The Monster Study." (For a contrary characterization, see "Retroactive Ethical Judgments and Human Subjects Research: the 1939 Tudor Study in Context," in Robert Goldfarb, ed., Ethics: A Case Study in Fluency (San Diego and Oxford: Plural Publishing, 2005), ch. 9, p. 139. Link label)
His son is former American Federal Communications Commission
(FCC) commissioner Nicholas Johnson
.
-- through teaching, research, scholarly and other writing, lecturing, supervision of graduate students, and persuading K-12 schools, the Veterans Administration
and other institutions of the need for speech pathologists. He played a major role in the creation of the American Speech and Hearing Association.
Johnson's book People in Quandaries: The Semantics of Personal Adjustment (1946; still in print from the Institute of General Semantics
) is an excellent introduction to general semantics applied to psychotherapy. In 1956 his Your Most Enchanted Listener was published; in 1972, his Living With Change: The Semantics of Coping, a collection of selected portions of transcriptions of hundreds of his talks, organized by Dorothy Moeller, provided further general semantic insights. He also published many articles in his lifetime, in journals, including ETC: A Review of General Semantics. [1] Neil Postman acknowledges the influence of People in Quandaries in his own excellent general semantics book Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk (1976, Delacorte, New York):
Patricia Zebrowski, University of Iowa assistant professor of speech pathology and audiology, notes, "The body of data that resulted from Johnson's work on children who stutter and their parents is still the largest collection of scientific information on the subject of stuttering onset. Although new work has determined that children who stutter are doing something different in their speech production than non-stutterers, Johnson was the first to talk about the importance of a stutterer's thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings. We still don't know what causes stuttering, but the 'Iowa' way of approaching study and treatment is still heavily influenced by Johnson, but with an added emphasis on speech production."
One of the most thorough single Web site collections of material regarding Wendell Johnson is http://www.uiowa.edu/~cyberlaw/oldinav/wjhome.html. It contains links to his Who's Who in America entry and c.v., bibliographies, excerpts from his writing, audio of his general semantics lectures, articles by others about Johnson, and an excerpt from Robert Goldfarb, editor, Ethics: A Case Study from Fluency (2005).
Attacks on the 1930s master's thesis, and the journalistic labeling as a "monster study," contributed to controversy. On the one hand, speech research scientists Nicoline Grinager Ambrose and Ehud Yairi are critical of the conclusions that Mary Tudor drew from her data, but believe that no harm was done to the subjects and that there was no intention to do harm: "[T]he study failed to provide any credible scientific support that stuttering was produced 'in the laboratory' . . .. [T]here is no evidence of intent to harm, and . . . the objective of increasing disfluent speech should not be confused with instilling chronic stuttering in normally fluent children." To which human subjects researcher Dr. Michael Flaum has written, "That really ought to be the end of the matter. If harm was neither intended nor done, what's the problem? Where's the 'lack of ethics'?" The University's vice president for research said, "the experiment was both justified and ethical. . . . [I]t was fully within the norms of the time." [Sources: "Retroactive Ethical Judgments and Human Subjects Research: the 1939 Tudor Study in Context," linked above.]
On the other hand, Richard Schwartz concludes in Chapter 6 of the book that the study "was unfortunate in Tudor and Johnson's lack of regard for the potential harm to the children who participated and in their selection of institutionalized children simply because they were easily available. The deception and the apparent lack of debriefing were also not justifiable." Other authors concur claiming the orphan experiment was not within the ethical boundaries of acceptable research. Others, however, felt that the ethical standards in 1939 were different from those used today. Some felt the study was poorly designed and executed by Tudor, and as a result the data offered no proof of Johnson's subsequent theory that "stuttering begins, not in the child's mouth but in the parent's ear" -- i.e., that it is the well-meaning parent's effort to help the child avoid what the parent has labelled "stuttering" (but is in fact within the range of normal speech) that contributes to what ultimately becomes the problem diagnosed as stuttering.
[The following was written by obvious critics of Johnson, but is retained rather than deleted, or added to at great length, as evidence of the kinds of attacks that were launched by the journalist and others 60 some years after the master's thesis. A sampling of bracketed "Responses," supported in the chapter cited above, have been inserted.]
Johnson chose one of his master's graduate students, Mary Tudor (researcher), to conduct the experiment and he supervised her research. Many of the orphan children were psychologically scarred by Johnson's experiment after Tudor spent four months in 1939 conditioning them to stutter through negative speech therapy in which she belittled them for their own normal speech imperfections. [Response: independent scientists concluded no psychological scarring or other harm was done, and that even the attempted "disfluency," which they point out is very different from "conditioning them to stutter," did not occur.] Dubbed "The Monster Study
" by some of his peers who were horrified that Johnson would experiment on orphan children to prove a theory, 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. [Response: The thesis was not "hidden," but rather routinely treated like all others, placed in the University Library, where it still resided when the 21st Century controversy arose. Obviously, it had nothing to do with "Nazis."] The University of Iowa publicly apologized for the Monster Study in 2001. A university spokesman called the experiment "regrettable" 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." [Response: However, the more balanced response of the University's vice president for research was that, "the experiment was both justified and ethical. . . . [I]t was fully within the norms of the time."] Before her death, Mary Tudor expressed deep regret about her role in the study and maintained that Wendell Johnson should have done more to reverse the negative effects on the orphan children's speech. In spite of Wendell Johnson's role in the creation of the study, Tudor still felt he had made many positive contributions to speech pathology and stuttering research.
Some of subjects of the Tudor study brought a law suit against the University of Iowa that was settled in 2007 for less than 7 percent of what the plaintiffs were asking ($925,000).
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
psychologist
Psychologist
Psychologist is a professional or academic title used by individuals who are either:* Clinical professionals who work with patients in a variety of therapeutic contexts .* Scientists conducting psychological research or teaching psychology in a college...
, speech pathologist and author and was a proponent of General Semantics
General Semantics
General semantics is a program begun in the 1920's that seeks to regulate the evaluative operations performed in the human brain. After partial program launches under the trial names "human engineering" and "humanology," Polish-American originator Alfred Korzybski fully launched the program as...
(or GS). He was born in Roxbury, Kansas
Roxbury, Kansas
Roxbury is an unincorporated community about 14.8 miles east of Lindsborg in McPherson County, Kansas, United States. The population was 100 at the 1910 census. The original name for the area was Colfax City but the name was changed to Roxbury on March 4, 1875 due to an act of...
and died in Iowa City, Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
Iowa City is a city in Johnson County, State of Iowa. As of the 2010 Census, the city had a total population of about 67,862, making it the sixth-largest city in the state. Iowa City is the county seat of Johnson County and home to the University of Iowa...
. The Wendell Johnson Speech and Hearing Center, part of the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics is named after this scientific pioneer. He is known for the experiment nicknamed "The Monster Study." (For a contrary characterization, see "Retroactive Ethical Judgments and Human Subjects Research: the 1939 Tudor Study in Context," in Robert Goldfarb, ed., Ethics: A Case Study in Fluency (San Diego and Oxford: Plural Publishing, 2005), ch. 9, p. 139. Link label)
His son is former American Federal Communications Commission
Federal Communications Commission
The Federal Communications Commission is an independent agency of the United States government, created, Congressional statute , and with the majority of its commissioners appointed by the current President. The FCC works towards six goals in the areas of broadband, competition, the spectrum, the...
(FCC) commissioner Nicholas Johnson
Nicholas Johnson
Nicholas Johnson is best known for his controversial term as a dissenting Federal Communications Commission commissioner, 1966-1973, and his book, How to Talk Back to Your Television Set...
.
Stuttering contributions
Considered one of the earliest and most influential speech pathologists in the field, he spent most of his life trying to find the cause and cure for stutteringStuttering
Stuttering , also known as stammering , is a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words or phrases, and involuntary silent pauses or blocks in which the stutterer is unable to produce sounds...
-- through teaching, research, scholarly and other writing, lecturing, supervision of graduate students, and persuading K-12 schools, the Veterans Administration
United States Department of Veterans Affairs
The United States Department of Veterans Affairs is a government-run military veteran benefit system with Cabinet-level status. It is the United States government’s second largest department, after the United States Department of Defense...
and other institutions of the need for speech pathologists. He played a major role in the creation of the American Speech and Hearing Association.
Johnson's book People in Quandaries: The Semantics of Personal Adjustment (1946; still in print from the Institute of General Semantics
Institute of General Semantics
The Institute of General Semantics is a not-for-profit corporation established in 1938 by Alfred Korzybski, to support research and publication on the topic of General Semantics. The Institute publishes Korzybski's writings, including the seminal text Science & Sanity, and books by other authors...
) is an excellent introduction to general semantics applied to psychotherapy. In 1956 his Your Most Enchanted Listener was published; in 1972, his Living With Change: The Semantics of Coping, a collection of selected portions of transcriptions of hundreds of his talks, organized by Dorothy Moeller, provided further general semantic insights. He also published many articles in his lifetime, in journals, including ETC: A Review of General Semantics. [1] Neil Postman acknowledges the influence of People in Quandaries in his own excellent general semantics book Crazy Talk, Stupid Talk (1976, Delacorte, New York):
- I am tempted to say that there are two kinds of people in the world -- those who will learn something from this book (People in Quandaries) and those who will not. The best blessing I can give you is to wish that as you go through life you will be surrounded by the former and neglected by the latter.
Patricia Zebrowski, University of Iowa assistant professor of speech pathology and audiology, notes, "The body of data that resulted from Johnson's work on children who stutter and their parents is still the largest collection of scientific information on the subject of stuttering onset. Although new work has determined that children who stutter are doing something different in their speech production than non-stutterers, Johnson was the first to talk about the importance of a stutterer's thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, and feelings. We still don't know what causes stuttering, but the 'Iowa' way of approaching study and treatment is still heavily influenced by Johnson, but with an added emphasis on speech production."
One of the most thorough single Web site collections of material regarding Wendell Johnson is http://www.uiowa.edu/~cyberlaw/oldinav/wjhome.html. It contains links to his Who's Who in America entry and c.v., bibliographies, excerpts from his writing, audio of his general semantics lectures, articles by others about Johnson, and an excerpt from Robert Goldfarb, editor, Ethics: A Case Study from Fluency (2005).
Attacks on the 1930s master's thesis, and the journalistic labeling as a "monster study," contributed to controversy. On the one hand, speech research scientists Nicoline Grinager Ambrose and Ehud Yairi are critical of the conclusions that Mary Tudor drew from her data, but believe that no harm was done to the subjects and that there was no intention to do harm: "[T]he study failed to provide any credible scientific support that stuttering was produced 'in the laboratory' . . .. [T]here is no evidence of intent to harm, and . . . the objective of increasing disfluent speech should not be confused with instilling chronic stuttering in normally fluent children." To which human subjects researcher Dr. Michael Flaum has written, "That really ought to be the end of the matter. If harm was neither intended nor done, what's the problem? Where's the 'lack of ethics'?" The University's vice president for research said, "the experiment was both justified and ethical. . . . [I]t was fully within the norms of the time." [Sources: "Retroactive Ethical Judgments and Human Subjects Research: the 1939 Tudor Study in Context," linked above.]
On the other hand, Richard Schwartz concludes in Chapter 6 of the book that the study "was unfortunate in Tudor and Johnson's lack of regard for the potential harm to the children who participated and in their selection of institutionalized children simply because they were easily available. The deception and the apparent lack of debriefing were also not justifiable." Other authors concur claiming the orphan experiment was not within the ethical boundaries of acceptable research. Others, however, felt that the ethical standards in 1939 were different from those used today. Some felt the study was poorly designed and executed by Tudor, and as a result the data offered no proof of Johnson's subsequent theory that "stuttering begins, not in the child's mouth but in the parent's ear" -- i.e., that it is the well-meaning parent's effort to help the child avoid what the parent has labelled "stuttering" (but is in fact within the range of normal speech) that contributes to what ultimately becomes the problem diagnosed as stuttering.
[The following was written by obvious critics of Johnson, but is retained rather than deleted, or added to at great length, as evidence of the kinds of attacks that were launched by the journalist and others 60 some years after the master's thesis. A sampling of bracketed "Responses," supported in the chapter cited above, have been inserted.]
Johnson chose one of his master's graduate students, Mary Tudor (researcher), to conduct the experiment and he supervised her research. Many of the orphan children were psychologically scarred by Johnson's experiment after Tudor spent four months in 1939 conditioning them to stutter through negative speech therapy in which she belittled them for their own normal speech imperfections. [Response: independent scientists concluded no psychological scarring or other harm was done, and that even the attempted "disfluency," which they point out is very different from "conditioning them to stutter," did not occur.] Dubbed "The Monster Study
The Monster Study
The Monster Study is the name given to a stuttering experiment performed on twenty-two orphan children in Davenport, Iowa in 1939. It was conducted by Wendell Johnson at the University of Iowa. Johnson chose one of his graduate students, Mary Tudor, to conduct the experiment and he supervised her...
" by some of his peers who were horrified that Johnson would experiment on orphan children to prove a theory, 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. [Response: The thesis was not "hidden," but rather routinely treated like all others, placed in the University Library, where it still resided when the 21st Century controversy arose. Obviously, it had nothing to do with "Nazis."] The University of Iowa publicly apologized for the Monster Study in 2001. A university spokesman called the experiment "regrettable" 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." [Response: However, the more balanced response of the University's vice president for research was that, "the experiment was both justified and ethical. . . . [I]t was fully within the norms of the time."] Before her death, Mary Tudor expressed deep regret about her role in the study and maintained that Wendell Johnson should have done more to reverse the negative effects on the orphan children's speech. In spite of Wendell Johnson's role in the creation of the study, Tudor still felt he had made many positive contributions to speech pathology and stuttering research.
Some of subjects of the Tudor study brought a law suit against the University of Iowa that was settled in 2007 for less than 7 percent of what the plaintiffs were asking ($925,000).
External links
- http://www.uiowa.edu/~cyberlaw/oldinav/wjhome.html