Frederick Martin's Speech Correction
Methods and Philosophies

by Lynne Hewitt, Ithaca College

Frederick Martin was a speech correctionist and educator in the early years of the profession in the United States, founding one of the earliest U.S. speech correction programs affiliated with an institution of higher education at Ithaca College in 1921. Martin was a person who stuttered; he underwent a course of speech correction in France in Arthur Chervin’s institute that was apparently of significant benefit, although his written works make scant mention of Chervin’s writings or methods. Chervin advocated training of massed repetition of sounds, starting with vowels, moving to consonants, and so on until students were able to speak fluently and correctly. As can be seen by reviewing Martin’s own approach as outlined in his Manual of Speech Training (1945), Chervin’s ideas, while not credited, appear to have had continuing influence on Martin’s own beliefs.

Martin had a number of degrees, including a degree in medicine, and he references a variety of physical theories of causes of “speech defects”, such as failure of the thymus gland to be absorbed causing stuttering. Side by side with medically oriented ideas, Martin presents a number of psychological theories. He devotes a significant portion of the Manual to discussion of the negative effects of stuttering on self-confidence and self-concept. He is harshly critical of psychoanalytic approaches to treatment of stuttering, because in his view they placed undue emphasis on the uncovering of an original psychological cause. As he says in his manual,, “Psychoanalysis as a cure for stammering has passed into oblivion with other ephemeral flights of fancy” (Martin, 1945). For Martin, the ongoing daily negative experiences of the person who stutters were the key elements of the problem that must be addressed, breaking a cycle of fear and avoidance. In the Manual, he emphasizes how negative experiences in past attempts at speaking can cause a build-up of fear and humiliation that cause a mild problem to become severe. The terminology used in his work made a distinction between stammering and stuttering, with the former being a more severe problem involving speech avoidance, significant psychological trauma, and whole body effects, whereas the latter was seen as confined to repetition of sounds and syllables, without undue struggle. The treatment of stammering thus would involve instilling confidence in speaking as a critical need for success.

Martin divides speech “defects” into five categories: stammering and stuttering; lisping; lalling; defective phonation from habit; and foreign accent. Treatment for all of these is based on employing a series of graded exercises, starting with vowels, moving to vowel plus consonant, then consonant plus vowel, and so on till the person can recite poems and declaim passages. This closely parallels Chervin’s method. In the Martin approach, clients would be asked to repeat these following the teacher’s model. He appears to have subscribed to a moto-kinesthetic view of some sort, and the repetition of correct productions under close guidance was intended to provide a correct auditory, visual, and motor pattern. In stuttering treatment, the idea was to create an automatic cognitive template for correct sound, syllable, and word production that would overwrite the images of struggle, repetition, and aphonia that a worsening problem would cause to form in the mind. He decries any approach that results in unnatural speech productions, such as the “Octave twist” promoted by Scripture, or unusual speech breathing patterns to induce fluency. He notes the social disvalue that such odd-sounding speech habits would cause.

The importance of auditory-verbal imagery replacing old, incorrect patterns recurs throughout his descriptions of treatments for all the other disorders covered in the book. Martin saw his approach as based in science, but he does not cite research to support any of his claims. He was not a member of the group that founded the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (originally, the American Academy of Speech Correction), thus it appears he did not work closely with other experts. While at Ithaca, Martin offered both clinical services as well as courses for teachers interested in speech correction. One of his students, Helen Peppard, advocates similar speech drills in her text The Correction of Speech Defects (1935), but the chapter on stammering clearly differs from Martin’s view, in that it advocates for syllabification and pausing, both of which Martin decries in his text.

Martin’s work also follows in the footsteps of the elocution movement in the early 20th century in the United States. In his manual, he emphasizes the importance of correct diction, and he lists defective pronunciations that must be corrected, such as “gimme” for “give me”, describing them as “careless” and attributable to the “lack of speech discipline” (pp. 41-42). He also attributes some of the sound changes observable in the English spoken in the New York City of his day to the influence of languages spoken by immigrants, e.g., pronouncing “civil” with a schwa in the second syllable. This is of course the most typical pronunciation in contemporary American speech, with the diminution of vowel quality in unstressed syllables. These beliefs point to nativism is an apparent influence in his thinking, and along with others of the day, he subscribed to prescriptivist beliefs regarding linguistic “correctness”.

References

Chervin, Arthur (1895). Bégaiment et autres défauts de pronunciation. Société d’éditions scientifiques.

Hedrick, J. (1922) A unique speech clinic, Quarterly Journal of Speech, 8:2, 161-165, DOI: 10.1080/00335632209379377

Martin’s stuttering approach was included as one of the main methods explained to students attending training sessions at a speech clinic associated with the Georgetown University Hospital:

“As the Freudian Theory of Psycho-Analysis is receiving much attention and credence by the psychiatrists in Washington, that theory as applied to stuttering was explained. Bleumel's Theory of Auditory Amnesia; Bogue 's Silent Period followed by drills accompanied by hand movements; Scripture's Theory of Octave Twist; Martin's Drill on Phonetics; and Swift's Theory of Visual Asthenia become familiar to these students and their various values are emphasized.”

Martin, Frederick (1945). Manual of speech correction. National Institute for Voice Disorders.

Peppard, Helen (1935). The correction of speech defects. The Macmillan Company.