Research on communicational support by sign language for the Hearing Disabled from a cognitive scientific perspective

听障群体的目标是利用信息通信终端为听障人群提供通信支持。它还旨在从工程和认知科学的角度研究和开发识别、生成、编码和传输系统，以及为其提供支持的基础技术。我们根据对听障人士需求的调查，提出了必要的沟通支持方式。听障群体分为四个小组：手语感知与编码小组、手语动画制作小组、手语识别小组和听障人群需求调查小组。我们在视障小组的基础上成立了听力障碍扩展工作组，对口语的音素进行了详细的分析。工作组召开了几次会议和工作营，致力于sIGNDEX V3的开发，该V3计划利用sIGNDEX V2的成果解决日本手语的显著特征、音素和语素问题。到目前为止，我们已经确定了如何描述这些特征，以及如何提取语素。明年我们将继续这个工作组的工作。我们还研究了一个心理负荷问题，即手语使用者在互动交流中所承受的心理压力。我们发现NASA-TLX在测量精神负荷程度方面足够有效。我们的研究结果将发表在电子、信息和通信工程研究所和人机界面学会等期刊上。这四个子小组继续研究如何共享数据、统一评估方法以及协调子小组的任务。

The hearing impairment group has aimed at the communication support using information-and-communication terminals for the hearing impaired people. It has also aimed at the research and development of systems for recognition, generation, coding, and transmission in the view point of engineering and cognitive science, together with fundamental technologies for their support. We have proposed ways of the communication support necessary for the hearing impaired, based on their needs that we have investigated.The hearing impairment group has four subgroups for: sign language perception and coding, sign language animation generation, sign language recognition, and investigation of the hearing impaired people's needs.We have set up the extended hearing impairment working group along with the visual impairment group, which has analyzed phonemes of oral languages in detail. Holding several meetings and work camps, the working group has worked on the development of sIGNDEX V3, which plans to tackle the problems of distinctive features, phonemes, and morphemes of Japanese Sign Language, utilizing the outcomes of sIGNDEX V2. We have so far determined how to describe the distinctive features, and how to extract the morphemes. We continue this working group next year.We have also worked on a problem of mental workload, which is mental stress that sign language users undergo during interactive communication. We have found that NASA-TLX is effective enough for measuring the degree of mental workload.Our findings will appear in journals such as the one of the Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineering, and the one of Human Interface Society.The four subgroups continue to work on how to share their data, to unite the evaluation methods, and to coordinate the tasks of the subgroups.