Stimulus presentation formats in training paradigms for tactile aids.
Janet M. Weisenberger · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1992
Previous studies involving tactile aids for speech perception conducted in our laboratory have typically employed a training paradigm consisting of initial training with single-item speech stimuli in a citation-style live-voice presentation, followed by later training with connected discourse. This selection of training procedures was based on the assumption that for recognition of vibratory patterns corresponding to particular phonemes and/or syllables, such initial single-item presentation promoted rapid learning. However, given the sometimes substantial differences in the acoustic waveforms of items presented citation style or in the context of connected speech, it is possible that early initial training with citation-style stimuli would actually impair later performance with connected speech. Thus, although high levels of performance for users of tactile aids with connected speech have previously been obtained, it is possible that initial training with stimulus items in carrier phrases would be superior to citation-style presentation. In the present study, two groups of subjects were trained to use the Queen’s University tactile vocoder; one group was trained initially with single-item stimuli presented citation style, and the other group was trained initially with stimuli presented in carrier phrases. Both groups were later tested in a connected discourse tracking task. Preliminary analysis of the results suggests no differences between the two groups, suggesting that citation-style presentation and carrier-phrase presentation have equivalent effects on later connected speech performance. [Work supported by NIH.]