Retraining left-handers and the aetiology of stuttering: The rise and fall of an intriguing theory

Abstract

Many twentieth-century British and American educators, psychologists, and psychiatrists advocated forcing left-handed children to write with their right hands. These experts asserted that a child's decision to rely on his or her left hand was a reflection of a defiant personality that could best be corrected by forcible switching. The methods used to retrain left-handers were often tortuous, including restraining a resistant child's left hand. In contrast, those who saw left-handedness as inherited, but natural, not only disapproved of forced switching, but also often warned of its putative negative consequences, especially stuttering. These claims were given credence in the 1930s by influential University of Iowa researchers, including psychiatrist S. T. Orton, psychologist L. E. Travis, and their students. From the late 1920s until the 1950s, the Iowa researchers published articles and books connecting the etiology of stuttering to forcing natural left-handers to write and perform other tasks with their right hand. Based on their clinical studies these practitioners concluded that stutterers displayed weak laterality. The Iowa group also published detailed case studies of patients whose stuttering was putatively cured by the restoration of their left-handedness. By the late-1940s, the connection between stuttering and retraining evaporated, due in large part to the growing dominance of psychoanalytic psychiatry. Despite robust statistical and clinical evidence, the connection between forced hand switching and stuttering has largely been forgotten. Recent imaging studies of stutterers, however, have suggested that stuttering is tied to disturbed signal transmission between the hemispheres. Similar to the Iowa researchers of the 1930s, current investigators have found connections between stuttering and weak laterality.

Keywords:

• Stuttering
• Retraining
• Left hand
• Laterality

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank the two anonymous readers of this article and Carol Kushner for their comments, suggestions, and editorial advice. This essay expands and elaborates my brief overview essay on this topic that appeared in The Lancet (Kushner, 2011b).

Notes

¹Drinkwater believed that “ambidextrous children were above the average in mental capacity”. He asserted that “it certainly seems easier for a left-handed child to learn to do expert acts with the right hand, than for a right-handed child to acquire manual dexterity with the left hand”.

²Stammering and stuttering are synonymous. British writers more often used the former while North Americans more often, but not always, used the latter.

³Her survey of Trenton State School for Girls, the Hallowell State School for Girls and the Shirley Industrial School for Boys revealed that “15% of the boys and 6.5% of the girls are left-handed”. Moreover, Smith found that in institutions for the feeble-minded in Maine and Rhode Island, 11% of the girls and 8.5% of the boys were left-handed (p. 32).

⁴Dyslexia was first identified in 1887 by the German ophthalmologist Rudolph Berlin (Wagner, 1973). I thank an anonymous external evaluator of this manuscript for pointing out this source.

⁵A similar but more wide-ranging claim was made by Child psychiatrist Ira S. Wile (1894–1943), President of the American Orthopsychiatric Association and former New York City Commissioner of Education. Wile examined cases of 17 children who had been switched from left to right-handers. The group presented with an array of physical and behavioral difficulties ranging from enuresis, stuttering and learning difficulties to disruptive behaviors such as lying and stealing. In each case, the children were switched back to their natural hands and their negative behaviors, stuttering, and enuresis were eliminated (Wile, 1932, pp. 49–55).

⁶“This fact,” wrote Travis, “helps to account for the feeling of apprehension on the part of parents and teachers regarding left-handedness” (Travis, 1931, p. 56).

⁷Travis believed that other interventions, including psychotherapy, were also useful additions for treating stutterers: “A main goal to be achieved in the education of the stutterer's attitude toward his trouble is his impersonal evaluation of disability. He must learn to objectify it, and in some cases accept it” (p. 184).

⁸Johnson (1906–1965), a stutterer himself, went on to have a long and distinguished career as a psychologist and speech pathologist at the University of Iowa.

⁹Six of the cases were aged 5 to10, three were 12 to18, and six were 20 to 71 (20, 26, 30, 37, 39, and 71). The six females ranged from 10 to 30 years.

¹⁰According to author Benson Bobrick, Johnson's own attempt to cure his stuttering by switching to left-handedness failed, although Johnson had no evidence that he had been forced to become a right-hander in the first place (Bobrick, 1995, p. 129).

¹¹Bryngelson was not dogmatic about his findings. He admitted that “there is no reason to believe that, because the search for the aetiology of stuttering has obtained for nearly 2,000 years, this is the age in which speech pathologists will find its ultimate and final truth” (p. 155).

¹²“Few people realise just how common it still is for left-handers to be encouraged or forced to use their right hand,” wrote Clark in 1967. “Some left-handers are permitted to write with the left hand, but by no means all” (Clark, 1957, p. 38).

¹³Bloodstein obtained his PhD in 1948 at the University of Iowa. Travis directed his dissertation.

¹⁴According to Coren (1992), well into the 1970s many teachers, especially those at Catholic parochial schools, “routinely attempt[ed] to force children to write with the right hand regardless of their natural predisposition” (pp. 65–66). Reporting on their investigations of 650 British Columbia undergraduates, Porac and colleagues found that attempts to switch left-handers into right-handers were common in Canada in the 1980s (Porac, Coren, & Searleman, 1986). Combining the findings of two of Porac's studies, Coren reported that “approximately 55 percent of all left-handers” recalled attempts by others to switch them from left-handedness. Of that group 64% reported the attempts were made before their eighth or ninth year of age (Coren, 1992, p. 68).