With the age of electronics, it was found that hearing your own voice played back to you almost as soon as you speak helps a stutter as well.

That's called the Delayed Auditory Feedback effect.

Altering the pitch of the playback gives an extra boost to the effect as well; that's called Frequency Altered Feedback.

Now, researchers at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina have created a small device that combines both these effects in a portable earpiece.

The device fits inside your ear, picks up the sound of you speaking, alters the pitch a little, and plays it back to you.

The first tests look promising: many of the volunteers who had a stutter found that their problem was helped by wearing such an electronic earpiece.

Scientists who study stuttering sound a more cautious note: such effects, while real, have shown a tendency to be short-term.

Still,even if it isn't a fix, tiny microelectronic devices like this may indeed be a help–and we may be seeing more and more of them in the future.