Effectiveness of linguapalatal place cues for a deaf speaker
Samuel G. Fletcher, A. Hasegawa, M.J. McCutcheon, J. D. Gilliom, A. Schwartz · The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America · 1977
The effectiveness of linguapalatal contact place cues were examined in a study of a profoundly deaf adult speaker. A 96-electrode pseudopalate was used to sense linguapalatal contact during utterance of isolated sounds, words, and short sentences. Contact was displayed by an LED array bounded by the maxillary teeth. Initial shaping procedures were directed toward establishing the/t, s, ∫/ sounds. The repertoire was then expanded to include contrating posterior plosives and the afficate /t∫/. Some attention was given to establishing high front vowels. Tongue contact patterns attained on the goal sounds from 20 treatment sessions approximated those of “normal” speakers. Pre- and postintervention intelligibility tests on nontreatment words indicated correct placement of the consonant sounds in over 80% of their occurrances. Physiological and perceptual characteristics of the changes will be discussed. [Supported by NIH Grant NS-11852-02 and HEW Grant RSA 16-P5680 7/4-11.]