Abstract
A number of single-channel and multichannel tactile devices for hearing-impaired persons have been evaluated in our laboratory over the last several years. Both commercially available and experimental devices have been tested, including the Tactaid I, II, and V, Minifonator, Minivib, Queen's University tactile vocoder (both laboratory and wearable versions), and Tacticon TC-1600. Normal-hearing and hearing-impaired adults, and hearing-impaired children, have participated in a variety of training tasks, employing both recorded and live-voice stimuli. These tasks include simple detection of sound, environmental sound identification, syllable rhythm and stress categorization, phoneme identification, word identification, phrase and sentence identification, connected discourse tracking, and a question-and-answer “conversation” task. In the present paper, the results from these evaluations are considered as a whole, to permit generalizations about the kinds of information that can be provided by single-channel, dual-channel, and multichannel devices, with and without the addition of lipreading. In addition, results are discussed in terms of the development of “optimal” training procedures for the use of tactile aids. [Work supported by NSF and NIH.]
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