Sixteen children with moderate to profound sensorineural hearing loss were trained on the production and auditory perception of sibilants over two 2-week periods. Perception performance improved significantly during training periods with a small amount of carryover to non-training contrast periods. Improvements in production performance occurred…

Provided is an overview of technological devices which have been designed to help the deaf with problems of warning communication (both face-to-face and at a distance), education, entertainment, and acquisition of information. (Author/LS)

Hearing-impaired speechreaders use linguistic context to compensate for the poor visibility of some speech movements. Constraints on spoken language enhance speechreading performance and help compensate for the paucity of sensory data. The largest effects come from linguistic constraints imposed by sentence context--syntactic, semantic, and…

An imitative test of speech pattern contrast perception was administered to profoundly deaf children using hearing aids (n=76) or cochlear implants (n=18). Implant users performed, on average, similarly to individuals with an 88 decibel hearing loss, indicating that implant use can provide auditory speech perception capacity similar to that of…

This article explores the influence of technological advances on the management of deafness, and discusses some reasons for delays between development of new technologies and their application to the needs of special populations. Surgical treatment, prosthetic treatment (including implants and microphones), speech training, computer-assisted…

The hypothesis that tactile presentation of voice fundamental frequency is as effective as auditory presentation in aiding speechreading was proven through auditory stimulation experiments, psychophysical studies, phonetic-level tactile studies, and sentence-level studies. After training with the device, three postlingually deafened adults…