VOICE-PITCH TACTILE DISPLAY FOR THE DEAF

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The long-term objective is to produce a wearable tactile communication aid for the deaf. In contrast to other tactile aids the system will present a specific voice feature, voice pitch, that is known to provide important communication cues about syntactic structure and communicative intent. Deaf school children are very slow to adopt the usual dialogue conventions between teacher and pupil for exchanging information. It is believed that information about the teacher's voice pitch and rhythm will hasten the development of educative communication. Phase I of the project will develop a tactile pitch system that is wearable by school children. It will be based on an existing system, PORTAPITCH (Boothroyd, 1983). Pilot studies will develop training procedures for introducing deaf children to the communication cues available through the system. Phase II will carry out a controlled evaluation of the new system worn by deaf children in first-grade classrooms. Performance measures will describe the types and amount of communication between child and teacher. Commercial application of a successful device would serve to hasten the very slow development by the deaf pupil of the normal basis for learning in the classroom. A further application would be as an aid to the adult deaf for lipreading.