FEEDBACK MODIFICATION FOR REDUCING STUTTERING

A treatment system for reducing stuttering uses an auditory feedback modification technique to train the stutterer's speech motor control system to be more stable. The auditory feedback modification is based on a model of speech motor control in the human brain that incorporates a variation of observer-based control and Smith prediction. In addition, the Kalman gain of the model is set by comparing the speech muscular control signals sent to the person's vocal tract to the corresponding auditory speech sounds the person actually hears. It is believed that the speech motor control system of a stutterer has set the Kalman gain too high, thereby creating an unstable control system that in turn causes stuttering. A feedback modifier feeds back the stutterer's speech to the stutterer with a perturbation that is small enough to pass a validator function that is believed to be part of the speech motor control system. The small perturbations increase the difference between the target speech and the fed back speech, which is believed to cause the speech motor control system to decrease the Kalman gain. Over a treatment program, it is believed that the perturbations "train" or adapt the stutterer's speech motor control system so as to reduce the Kalman gain, which is further believed to persist when the auditory feedback is discontinued.