Analytic Study of the Tadoma Method: Background and Preliminary Results

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Abstract
Certain deaf-blind persons are taught, through the Tadoma method of speechreading, to use vibrotactile cues from the face and neck to understand speech. Preliminary tests of the speechreading ability of one adult Tadoma user were presented. The tests were of 4 major types: discrimination of speech stimuli; recognition of words in isolation and in sentences; interpretation of prosodic and syntactic features in sentences; and comphrension of written (Braille) and oral speech. Words in highly contextual environments were much better perceived than were words in low-context environments. Many of the word errors involved phonemic substitutions which shared articulatory features with the target phonemes, with a higher error rate for vowels than consonants. Relative to performance on word-recognition tests, performance on some of the discrimination tests was worse than expected. Perception of sentences appeared to be mildly sensitive to rate of talking and to speaker differences. The tests on perception of prosodic and syntactic features, while inconclusive, indicated that many of the features tested were not used interpreting sentences. On an English comphrension test, a higher score was obtained for items administered in Braille than through oral presentation.

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