Continued evaluation of a multipoint electrotactile speech aid
D. W. Sparks, P. K. Kuhl, A. E. Edmonds, Gary Gray, Michelle S. Bourgeois, Beatrix Wiedmer, J. Gray, Lee Ann H. Ardell · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1977
At the 92nd meeting of the Acoustical Society of America, we reported preliminary data on vowel and stop and nasal consonant recognition using our multipoint electrotactile speech aid (MESA). Speech tokens were presented to artifically deafened adults who were required to identify the tokens in three conditions; tactile presentation, visual presentation, and tactile plus visual presentation. This report will be an update on our continuing evaluation of the speech transmission capabilities of the MESA. Specifically, we have extended our tests to fricatives, stops in final position, vowel recognition across talkers, segmental and suprasegmental features within a sentence context, and, finally, connected discourse. While the MESA demonstrates excellent resolution for certain speech features, we will discuss m-difications of the MESA designed to enhance its transmission of those features not well resolved.