Wendell Johnson (April 16, 1906 – August 29, 1965) was an American psychologist, author and was a proponent of general semantics (or GS).
Johnson was president of his high school class, captain of the football, baseball, and basketball teams, and valedictorian.
Considered one of the earliest and most influential speech pathologists in the field, Johnson spent most of his life trying to find the cause and cure for stuttering – through teaching, research, scholarly and other writing, lecturing, supervision of graduate students, and persuading K-12 schools, the Veterans Administration and other institutions of the need for speech pathologists.
Patricia Zebrowski, University of Iowa assistant professor of speech pathology and audiology, notes, "The body of data that resulted from Johnson's work on children who stutter and their parents is still the largest collection of scientific information on the subject of stuttering onset.
We still don't know what causes stuttering, but the 'Iowa' way of approaching study and treatment is still heavily influenced by Johnson, but with an added emphasis on speech production."
[6] His son, Nicholas Johnson (September 23, 1934) was the former American Federal Communications Commission (FCC) commissioner from the years 1966 to 1973.
[citation needed] In 1965, the year of Wendell Johnson's death, he was in the process of writing the Encyclopædia Britannica entry on “Speech Disorders”, defending both his work and his study when he had a heart attack.