Unethical research

Stuttering study is subject of Halvorson's new book

By Sue Odegard

Following 17 years of research, UW-River Falls Professor Jerry Halvorson, who lives in the town of Diamond Bluff, has broken the silence surrounding a 1939 stuttering study performed on orphans.

Halvorson's book, "Abandoned: Now Stutter My Orphan" reveals the results of a study done at the University of Iowa that was concealed for almost 50 years because of the questionable methods used. Dr. Wendell Johnson directed the study and Mary Tudor, a master's degree candidate, did the work during a 4-month period at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Orphanage in 1939. She was 22 at the time.

Through a process called "evaluative labeling" normal-speaking orphans were turned into stutterers. Many years after the study, some of the children still showed stuttering behaviors, despite efforts to help them.

"I started doing research for the book in 1983," Halvorson said recently, "but I've only been actively writing it for about a year. It is historical fiction, based on fact."

The results of what came to be called "The Monster Study" were never published, even though they supported Tudor's evaluative labeling theory. However, Johnson developed a therapy program for preventing stuttering during the early 1940s, based on Tudor's work.

"(Johnson) apparently was concerned about how his professional colleagues and the general public would react to learning that he had turned orphans into stutterers, particularly at that time when the Holocaust was going on in Germany and highly unethical medical experimentation was being done on inmates of concentration camps," writes Franklin H. Silverman in the foreward to the book. "While the evidence he used was somewhat weak, this therapy program was widely accepted and undoubtedly prevented some children from developing the disorder."

Silverman is a professor of speech pathology at Marquette University and clinical professor of rehabilitation medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin. He met Halvorson in the mid- 1960s while both were participants in the stuttering research program at the University of Iowa.

Silverman decided to publish the evidence that supported Johnson's therapy program after Johnson's death in 1965. Halvorson was prompted to contact Tudor, and the resulting research led to the writing of "Abandoned: Now Stutter My Orphan."

Halvorson is a professor of communicative disorders at UW-RF. He attended UW-RF from 1959-1963 and has been on the staff there since 1968.

He received his Ph.D. in speech pathology from the University of Minnesota and his Certificate of Clinical Competence in Speech-Language Pathology-Audiology from the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association.

Halvorson began his academic study of stuttering in 1961. From 1963-64, he worked on his master's degree from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, where he learned about the teachings of Johnson and worked under the direction of Johnson's protege, Dr. Dean Williams.

In 1996 Halvorson interviewed Tudor about her work.

"Public revelation of Mary Tudor's research will alter the course of stuttering treatment," Halvorson said. "The time has come to reexamine the effects of evaluative labeling on speech fluency. No investigator in the history of clinical stuttering research has held the key to a vault of such valuable, yet suppressed knowledge. When unlocked, it reveals a startlingly simple solution to a communication problem that has vexed the greatest minds throughout all the centuries of spoken human language."

The book opens with the two main characters, Frank, age 10, and Carl, age 9, being bused to a revival meeting led by evangelist Billy Sunday. The orphan boys are inspired to go forward to be healed by the minister - Frank for his stuttering and Carl for his polio.

Although both receive temporary relief from their maladies, once they return to the orphanage, Frank begins to stutter again, and Carl finds he needs his leg brace.

Under the watchful eye of their house mother, Miss Grundy, a beastly woman who preys on children with handicaps, their progress is impeded even further.

"Orphan children were very vulnerable and very available at the time," Halvorson said. "In Tudor's study, 22 children were used. They were boys and girls between the ages of 5-15. None of them stuttered prior to the study."

Six of the children were "labeled" stutterers and were manipulated into developing stuttering behaviors. Six were placed in an "achiever's" group and praised for their verbal skills.

After studying the results of Tudor's work, Johnson evolved a diagnosogenic theory of stuttering and the core belief that the genesis of stuttering is in the diagnosis - many of the characteristics actually develop after a stuttering diagnosis and labeling process begins.

Halvorson said he didn't want to divulge all of the things the book reveals - he wants readers to discover them in the text. But the character of Frank is based in part on Franklin Silverman and partly from his own childhood experiences.

He is planning to present his research and the new book at the National Stuttering Project Annual Convention in Seattle June 26-27.

Halvorson has also written "Dakota Memory," a horse adventure. He lives in the town of Diamond Bluff in Hager City and published "Abandoned: Now Stutter My Orphan" through his own company, Halvorson Farms of Wisconsin, Inc.

For more information on either book, call Halvorson at 425-3834.