Investigating the MESA (Multipoint Electrotactile Speech Aid): The transmission of segmental features of speech

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Abstract
Normal-hearing young adults (4) were extensively trained in the use of a tactile speech-transmission system. Subjects were tested in the recognition of various phonetic elements including vowels and stop, nasal and fricative consonants under 3 receiving conditions; visual reception alone (lipreading), tactile reception alone and tactile plus visual reception. Subjects were artificially deafened using earplugs and white noise, and all speech tokens were presented live voice. Analysis of the data demonstrated that the tactile transform enables receiver to achieve excellent recognition of vowels in CVC [consonant-vowel-consonant] context and the consonantal features of voicing and nasality. This, combined with high recognition of vowels and the consonantal feature place of articulation through visual reception, led to recognition performance in the combined condition (visual plus tactual) which far exceeds either reception condition in isolation.

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