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This interesting little book is the story of a stutterer written by one of them. The author is a young man who, after the usual experiences with methods, aids and devices guaranteed to cure his affliction, including “stuttering schools,” found his way into Dr. Lee Travis's speech clinic at the University of Iowa, where, to quote his own words, he has “succeeded for all practical purposes in gaining an understanding of himself and his situation as a speech defective.” Incidentally he is recovering from this stuttering.
How did this understanding come about? In the Iowa Speech Clinic laboratories research in speech pathology has been carried on for several years. Dr. Travis's theory is “that stuttering is a definite neuromuscular derangement of the functional type in which there is a general reduction in cortical activity due to transient and mutually inhibitive activities of the associative areas of the right and the left cerebral hemispheres. In the stutterer, instead of nervous energy flowing into one center of greatest facility in transmission, it flows into two centers of equal facility in transmission, which function in reaction patterns of opposite orientation and configuration to produce in the peripheral speech organs simultaneous or alternate opposition in muscular movement. The symptoms of stuttering are mainly signs of the rivalry between the two sides of the brain.” The neurological basis of stuttering then, is a lack of a sufficiently dominant center in one or the other of the two cerebral hemispheres. Instruments have been developed which measure—or discover—the subject's native neural dominance; and by this means Mr. Johnson found, that though he had always been right-handed he should have been