Abstract
A synthetic Tadoma system has been developed for use as a research tool in studying the highly successful Tadoma method of tactual speech reception [Reed et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 77, 247–257 (1985)]. In the synthetic system, signals recorded from a talker's face are used to control an artificial mechanical face. Recently, an experienced deaf-blind Tadoma user was tested on open-set CID sentence reception; he obtained about 20% keyword identification. Although this score is well below his performance on natural Tadoma (about 85%), it is clearly above chance and was obtained after only about 10 h experience with the synthetic system. Using an improved version of the system, two normal subjects, artificially deafened and blinded, trained on the identification of consonants and vowels, initially using small sets of stimuli with feedback and working up to larger stimulus sets. Asymptotic performance reached values of 64% correct for a set of 24 consonants and 67% correct for a set of 15 vowels and diphthongs, scores similar to that for natural Tadoma. Taken together, these results imply that the synthetic system has captured much of the information available in Tadoma. [Work supported by NIH.]
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