University of Virginia Library

AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF STUTTERING. By John Madison Fletcher. American Journal of Psychology, April, 1914; Vol. XXV, pp. 201-255.

This paper is a dissertation submitted to the faculty of Clark University, Worcester, Mass., in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. It is thus from the Psychological Laboratory of Clark University.

This interesting study of Fletcher includes some general remarks in the introduction, the question of differentiation and definition, the physiological aspects (including breathing, vocalization, articulation and accessory movements), psychophysical changes (including volumetric changes, changes in heart rate and galvanic changes), a consideration of the interpretation of the results, the psychological relations (including emotions, attitudes, imagery, responsibility for Aufgabe, psychoanalysis, and association), heredity and conclusions. A valuable bibliography is added, and seven illustrative plates complete the paper.

Fletcher would reserve the word "stammering" for mispronunciation or incorrect speech, this stutter being anatomical (due to malformation of one or more organs of articulation) or developmental (due to incorrect functioning of the organs of articulation resulting in certain cases of immaturity, such as lisping). Stammering, in this sense, is of no psychological interest. The reviewer is in favor of employing the terms "stammering" and "stuttering" synonymously, as is the practice in England and America. The writer (Fletcher) finds that he cannot accept the Freudian interpretation of stuttering which has been offered by a number of different members of that school.

Although the entire paper is of interest and of value to the student of psychopathology, the purposes of this review can best be served by citing the following conclusions of the author: The motor manifestations of stuttering are found to consist of asynergies in the three musculatures of speech—breathing, vocalization and articulation. Certain accessory movements, which tend to

become stereotyped in each individual and which consist of tonic and clonic conditions of other muscles not involved in normal speech, accompany these asynergies. The type of asynergy and more particularly of accessory movements differ so widely that it is impossible to state that any special form of breathing, or articulation, or of vocalization is the fundamental factor in stuttering. Disturbances of pulse rate, of blood distribution and in psychogalvanic variations, appearing before, during and after the speaking interval, and the intensity of which varies approximately with the severity of the stuttering, accompany the motor manifestations of stuttering. The essential condition in stuttering is the complex state of mind, the quality rather than the intensity of these feeling states governing the rise of stuttering. Such feeling states as fear, anxiety, dread, shame, embarrassment, in fact, those feelings that tend toward inhibition and repression, are most likely to precede stuttering, and probably operate in a vicious circle as both cause and effect. The permanent condition of nervousness thought to be characteristic of stutterers should be regarded as effect rather than cause. The states of feeling that have to do with the production of stuttering vary in degree from strong emotions to mere attitudes or moods, the latter being often so slight in degree that it is difficult for the subject to report their presence. Stuttering also seems to be affected by the quality of mental imagery, by attention and by association. The affective and emotional experiences associated with the pronunciation of sounds rather than the nature of the sounds themselves determine the rise of stuttering. The author's final remarks are: "Stuttering, therefore, seems to be essentially a mental phenomenon in the sense that it is due to and dependent upon certain variations in mental state. Hence the study of stuttering becomes a specifically psychological problem; and it seems evident that a detailed analysis of all the various aspects of the phenomena of stuttering will furnish important contributions to general psychology."

MEYER SOLOMON.