Do You remember, how everything began?

 If You think, that the new method was developed in the throes of authorship by the aged learned scholars, You are wide of the mark. Birth of  technique was  fortuitous. Such was indeed our case. It  is possible to say, that the theory, "has grown" out of practice. 

  About  ten years ago we - young doctors-enthusiasts - spent the closed experiments on  speech modification. We had the task "to hide" a person,  make his voice unrecognizable, for example,  transform a voice of the man into a voice of the woman. We worked with military pilots: healthy strong guys with good speech data spoke into the  microphone, the computer program transformed their speech and returned it changed into the headphones. One day we were  strongly surprised  - suddenly our brave pilots   started stuttering before our eyes! They could not restore their fluent, correct speech with  all their efforts.  Having put on the headphones, we  understood, what the matter was. It appears, that because of a small technical delay the  speech, returned into the headphones, began to sound with small breaks, and that  led to impossibility to speak correctly, despite of all their efforts. It means, we  thought, that the person speaks how hears the speech (he follows his speech), and  decided to check up the guess on volunteers. In fact, randomness is one thing, and the correctly planned research is another. 

Our volunteers were  40 healthy people (20 men and 20 women) at  the age of  16 - 35 years. They were offered to speak into the microphone, listening to their speech in headphones, and our task was an artificial interruption of  sound input into the headphones, with duration of more than 0,1 second. Thus, all probationers had breaks of reproduction of own speech, with all features, characteristic of stuttering – palms  perspiration and increase of pulse. But  most of all we were surprised  by the occurrence of involuntary periodic convulsive contractions of face and neck muscles,  mainly observable at average and serious forms of logoneurosis. There could be no doubts – we had the model of stuttering.

  Then the logic was very simple: If breaks of the perceived speech make impossible fluent and correct speech, causing stuttering, then  for a stuttering person  we should make everything quite opposite. Our task was the development of the computer program, which could "cut out” or "filter", i.e. could not pass into the headphones to a stuttering person the breaks in his speech. Technically it turned out not so difficult, and soon we  got a desirable result. Indeed, having heard in the headphones his own, but already corrected speech, the patient has  to adjust oneself  to  it and cannot stutter any more! Scientists call this effect an auditory feedback mechanism.  On this principle the new technique of speech correction by means of computer programs  has been developed.