Tactile reception of fingerspelling and sign language

Abstract

Previous work on tactile speech reception by deaf‐blind individuals has focused on the Tadoma method [Reed et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 77, 247–257 (1985)]. Two additional methods of tactile communication, both of which are adaptations of methods designed for the visual sense but are used extensively within the deaf‐blind community, are tactile fingerspelling and tactile signing. The goal of the current research was to document the communication abilities of highly experienced deaf‐blind users of tactile fingerspelling and tactile signing. Experiments were conducted to determine reception accuracy for sentence‐level materials as a function of rate of presentation for each of the two methods. The results of these experiments will be compared to those obtained for visual reception of fingerspelling and signing as well as to results obtained through the Tadoma method of tactile speech communication. [Work supported by NIH.]