Acquisition of a Tactile-Alone Vocabulary by Normally Hearing Users of the Tickle TalkerTM

Tactile-alone word recognition training was provided to six normally hearing users of the Tickle TalkerTM, an electrotactile speech perception device. A mean group tactile-alone vocabulary of 31 words was learned in 12 h of training. These results were comparable to, or superior to, those reported for other tactile devices & Tadoma. With increased training the group became faster at learning tactually new words, which were introduced in small training sets. However, as their tactile-alone vocabulary grew, subjects required more training time to reach the pass criterion when evaluated on their recognition of their whole vocabulary list. A maximum possible vocabulary size was not established. The application of tactile-alone training with hearing-impaired users of the device is discussed. Adapted from the source document