Behavior: Relief for the Stutterer

Some 2,000,000 Americans suffer from the same speech impediment that tripped the distinguished tongues of Demosthenes, Aesop, Aristotle, Virgil and Winston Churchill. Demosthenes, so the story goes, cured himself of stuttering by stuffing his mouth with pebbles and competing with the roar of the surf. He may have had something. A Detroit physician, Dr. Marvin E. Klein, 33, reports remarkable results with an instrument that fills the stutterer's ears with the sound of a waterfall whenever he opens his mouth.

Bedtime Story. The Klein "speech rectifier" includes a tiny microphone that is worn over the larynx. Activated by the wearer's voice, the mike turns on a pocket-size generator that transmits the sound of gently rushing water to receivers plugged into the ears. While he is speaking, the wearer hears the waterfall, which muffles the full range of his voice. As soon as he stops speaking, the device automatically turns off.

Though not yet ready for production, the rectifier has demonstrated its effectiveness in laboratory tests. In one instance, a father was able to read his children a bedtime story for the first time in his life. In another, a young man who could not utter a single intelligible word in a five-minute reading test donned the rectifier and read for five minutes with only 26 speech blocks.

Why voice masking helps the stutterer is as much a mystery as the causes of stuttering itself. Until the sixth year, all children stutter to some extent, repeating themselves an average of 45 times in every 1,000 words. The tolerant parent either smiles indulgently at these apprentice mistakes or else takes no notice of them. Occasionally, however, the child is repeatedly commanded to talk straight. Some experts theorize that misguided attempts at discipline make the stutterer.

Seething Anger. According to another theory, the impediment is a symptom of buried hostility. Says Psychologist Murry Snyder, executive director of New York City's Speech Rehabilitation Institute: "Underneath the cloak of inhibition and mild manner, the stutterer often seethes with anger." In support of this theory, he and others note that the stutterer can be fluent, and usually is, in circumstances that do not require him to communicate his own feelings: when he is an actor, for example, delivering someone else's words to an audience of strangers.

Stuttering is difficult to overcome. Leading speech centers claim only a 25% cure rate; another 50% of the patients show some improvement, but the others are not helped at all. Klein's device may help improve these statistics.