The Tudor Study: Data and Ethics

Recent exposure of an experiment (the Tudor Study) conducted in 1939 at the University of Iowa with the aim of studying the effect of verbal labeling on the frequency of disfluency in children who stutter and in normally fluent children has raised strong reactions both from the general public and the scientific community. Allegedly, the investigator and her mentor, a past leader in the field of speech pathology, were successful in their attempts to induce stuttering in normally speaking children; hence, serious accusations of breech of ethics in science have been made. The potential clinical implications of such conclusions for the treatment of early childhood stuttering are far reaching and negate recent developments that employ direct therapies with preschool children who show signs of stuttering. The purpose of this article is to re-examine the data reported in the Tudor Study and its ethical ramifications. We conclude that none of the experimental questions posed by Tudor and Johnson received empirical support. A broad range of relevant ethical issues is discussed.