Stuttering

Dr. Gardner Gateley’s short article, “Johnson’s Diagnosogenic Theory of Stuttering” produces evidence vindicating Wendell Johnson's (1946) theory of stuttering that attempts to correct the misunderstandings surrounding his teachings about this speech pathology. Gateley argues that speech therapy practice suffered because many speech pathologists believed, wrongly, that Johnson taught that assigning the label "stuttering" to a speaker's repetitions of sounds and syllables actually caused the disorder.
Johnson examined how human responses to an event can reinforce it but did not argue that labeling itself was a cause. Parental responses to their children's early speech efforts were mediated by their diagnoses of this speech as the disorder called "stuttering," and this led to chronic "stuttering." It w...