Why the Diagnosogenic theory of stuttering onset has been dispelled by recent literature - Essay Example

Neurophysiology- Recent research has shown that people who stutter process speech and language in different areas of the brain than those who do not stutter. Family dynamics-High expectations and fast-paced lifestyles can contribute to stuttering. Technically known as dysphemia, it has sometimes been attributed to an underlying personality disorder. Brain scans of stutterers have found higher than normal activity in brain areas that coordinate conscious movement, suggesting that in people who stutter speech occurs less automatically than it does in most people.

In 1939, a controversial study, on the possibility of "creating a stutterer", was conducted by University of Iowa speech pathologist, Wendell Johnson and his graduate student Mary Tudor. The study tried to create stutterers over the course of 4 months, using 22 unwitting orphans from the Soldiers and Sailors Orphan's Home in Davenport, Iowa. Ethically acceptable at the time, it was designed to induce stuttering in normally fluent children and to test out Johnson's "Diagnosogenic theory" a theory suggesting that negative reactions to normal speech disfluencies cause stuttering in children.

The study divided the orphans into 3 groups. 6 normally fluent orphans would be given negative evaluations and criticisms regarding their speech, another group of 5 orphans who allegedly already stuttered would also receive that treatment, and the remaining 11 would be treated neutrally. The study concluded that the children given negative evaluative labeling went on to develop persistent, permanent stutters. The study was influential at the time, with many speech pathologists and child-health and educational professionals accepting Johnson's theory.

In 1988, Silverman first reported the results of this study in the Journal of Fluency Disorders and labeled it "The Monster Study". In June 2001, the San Jose Mercury News revealed this study to the public for the first time, leading to widespread controversy and debate about scientific ethics. Soon after, University of Illinois professors Nicoline Ambrose and Ehud Yairi wrote a paper discrediting the 1939 study, revealing flaws in data collection and method, as well as pointing out that none of the orphans actually did develop a permanent stutter.

The relevance of the Ambrose-Yairi study 63 years later is that the authors conclude, in effect, that the 1939 thesis did not prove the theory with which it is credited. In other words, the researcher did not, and could not have, "caused stuttering" in the subjects. For this and many other reasons the authors also conclude that most all of the ethical criticisms of the study are misplaced and unjustified. While criticism of a developing child's speech can certainly make a present stutter worse, it does not create a stutter.

The major findings, as have been reported over the last several years in the Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research (JSLHR), question longstanding concepts about the onset and developmental trends of early childhood stuttering. Like most other speech disorders, stuttering onset was gradual and occurred under uneventful circumstances, that early symptoms included only easy repetition of syllables and words, and that parents helped create the problem by reacting negatively to normal disfluencies.

Stuttering onset was sudden in at least one-third of the children, was severe in nature,