Abstract
Current results of an evaluation of the speech reception of deaf adults who are making
use of tactile aids for substantial periods of time in the field are described. Eight
deaf adults were provided with a wearable multichannel tactile aid that they were
asked to wear routinely in their everyday lives. These subjects, who did not receive
any specific training in the use of the tactile aid, participated in periodic laboratory
evaluations of their speech-reception performance with the aids and also provided
responses to a communication-profile survey. The laboratory results reported here
were concerned primarily with assessing speechreading ability with and without tactile
aids for several types of connected-speech materials and tasks. The relative gain
(difference between aided and unaided speechreading scores normalized by the maximum
possible improvement) observed for the reception of words in isolated sentences averaged
roughly 25%, with a range of 0-65% across subjects, and showed a tendency to increase
with the speechreading-alone score. Small improvements, averaging six words/minute
and ranging from −2 to 10 words/minute across subjects , were observed for connected-discourse
tracking when tactile aids were used to supplement speechreading compared to speechreading
alone. A comparison of performance for tactile aids, cochlear implants, and hearing
aids is presented for aided speechreading of sentence materials.
