Vibratory perception by deaf children

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Abstract
Audiologists and educators of the deaf have become interested in vibratory perception of speech because: (1) research suggests that profoundly deaf children feel rather than hear amplified speech through their ears, and educators must help them to use this acoustic (vibratory) speech information; and (2) vibratory transducers already are used in many classrooms for deaf children to provide supplementary speech input, and educators must learn how to present vibratory stimuli most effectively for perceptual learning. Vibration provides mainly the gross time-intensity information in speech. This paper describes the variety of speech cues that are available through the vibratory sense, for example, number of syllables; syllable rate, stress, and onset/decay; pause; and roughness. An optical analog (tracings from a storage oscilloscope) is used to show the type of information available to deaf persons through vibration. Deaf children are able to perform not only closed-set recognition tasks but also can learn to identify general characteristics of vibratory speech patterns. Although vibratory perception alone is limited for communication, vibratory input can serve as a supplement to lipreading and also as a speech-training aid for profoundly deaf persons.

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