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Nov 1990

Volume 88, Issue S1, pp. S1-S200

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back to top Session 9PP: Psychological and Physiological Acoustics: Electrical and Tactile Auditory Prostheses
Contributed Papers
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Tactile aids with deaf‐blind children (A)

Barbara Franklin

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 88, Issue S1, pp. S191-S191 (1990); (1 page)

Online Publication Date: 14 Aug 2005

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This paper will present the results of a 3‐yr study (1986–1989) comparing the effect of two tactile devices on communication skills of deaf‐blind children—a 2‐channel vibrotactile (Tactaid II) and a 16‐channel electrotactile aid (Tacticon). A total of three communicative behaviors were selected for each child. A single‐subject alternating treatment design was used and data from each of three substudies were analyzed using three combined Wilcoxin tests. In the first substudy, subjects displayed significanfly more of the desired behaviors when wearing the Tactaid than the Tacticon (0.05 level). In the second and third substudies, and in the replication‐across‐settings study, no differences were found in any of the conditions. In the replication‐across‐change agents study, both tactile devices produced significantly more of the desired behaviors than no device (0.05 level). One of the most important findings was that the children accepted both devices despite the tactile defensiveness often exhibited by so many of them. A second study to replicate the research using only the Tactaid II + device with deaf‐blind infants and preschoolers is underway (1989–1992), and the results of the first year of this study will also be presented. [Work supported by OSERS, U.S. Dept. of Educ.]
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Training paradigms for multichannel tactile aids (A)

Janet M. Weisenberger, Christine Brenner, and Ken W. Grant

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 88, Issue S1, pp. S192-S192 (1990); (1 page)

Online Publication Date: 14 Aug 2005

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Because connected speech presented through a multichannel tactile speech aid results in a complex and rapidly changing signal, it has been assumed that subjects having no prior tactile aid experience would require considerable amounts of “analytic” tactile training with phoneme and word‐level single‐item identification tasks, before they could usefully interpret connected speech. While it is the case that subjects who receive substantial amounts of analytic training with tactile aids perform better than subjects with no training, it may be the amount of prior experience, rather than the specific training tasks employed, that determines asymptotic performance levels. In the present study, groups of subjects were trained with a multichannel tactile aid in either an “analytic” condition (a graduated series of single‐item tasks) or a “nonanalytic” condition (connected speech tracking only). Each group received the same number of hours of tactile aid experience. During the final 20 h of the study, all subjects were tested with connected speech tracking. Results comparing these 20 h of tracking for the two groups showed no significant differences in performance. However, substantial intersubject differences indicated possible influences of other variables, including talker effects and subject familiarity with phonetics. These issues were addressed in a second experiment. [Work supported by NIH.]
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Evaluation of a wearable multichannel tactile aid (A)

Christine Brenner and Janet M. Weisenberger

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 88, Issue S1, pp. S192-S192 (1990); (1 page)

Online Publication Date: 14 Aug 2005

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In designing a tactile aid, the most important considerations are that a device provide useful information and that it be wearable. While electrotactile rather than vibrotactile devices are more easily made wearable, results with these devices to date have been disappointing. One exception to this has been the Tickle Talker (Univ. of Melbourne). The Tickle Talker is an eight‐channel device, worn as rings on the fingers of one hand, with a electrode placed on either side of each finger. The processor performs a formant extraction, displaying an estimated fundamental frequency, second formant frequency, and the amplitude of the speech signal. In an attempt to corroborate early promising results [Cowan et al., J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 85, 2593–2607 (1989)], this device was evaluated with three normally hearing adult subjects. In initial testing with closed set tasks done under a tactile aid alone condition, subjects on the average were able to identify the manner of production of stimuli 76% of the time, presence or absence of voicing 74% of the time, and medial vowel 81% of the time. Wearing the tactile aid in conjunction with lipreading raised subjects' scores on a subsequent closed set identification task from 57% lipreading alone to 72% with the device. Results to date with connected discourse tracking also show improvements with the device. [Work supported by NIH.]
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Vowel acoustics in cochlear implant patients (A)

J. Perkell, H. Lane, M. Svirsky, and J. Webster

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 88, Issue S1, pp. S192-S192 (1990); (1 page)

Online Publication Date: 14 Aug 2005

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Acoustic parameters were measured for vowels spoken in /hVd/ context by three postlingually deafened cochlear implant recipients. Two female subjects became deaf in adulthood; the male subject, in childhood. Recordings were made before and at intervals following processor activation. The measured parameters included formant frequencies, F0, SPL, duration, and amplitude difference between the first two harmonic peaks in the log magnitude spectrum (H1–H2). A number of changes were observed from pre‐ to post‐implant, with intersubject differences. The male subject showed changes in F1, vowel durations, and F0. These changes were consistent with one another; however, they were not necessarily in the direction of normalcy. On the other hand, the female subjects showed changes in F2, vowel durations, F0, and SPL, which were in the direction of normal values and, for some parameters, tended to enhance phonemic contrasts. For all three subjects, H1–H2 changed in a direction that was consistent with previously made flow measurements. [Work supported by NIH.]
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Discrimination of electrical trajectories by cochlear implant patients (A)

P. A. Busby, Y. C. Tong, and G. M. Clark

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 88, Issue S1, pp. S192-S192 (1990); (1 page)

Online Publication Date: 14 Aug 2005

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Psychophysical studies were conducted on eight cochlear implant patients to measure the discrimination of trajectories with time‐varying electrode positions, repetition rates, or current levels. Electrical stimulation was by means of the University of Melbourne/Cochlear multiple‐electrode prosthesis. Four patients were postlingually deaf adults and four were children who were deafened prior to 3 yr of age. In each study, the parameter values of the stimuli were systematically varied. The performance of the adults was, in general, superior to that of the children for the discrimination of electrode position and repetition rate trajectories. There were no major differences in performance between the adults and children for the discrimination of current level trajectories.
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Effect of age of onset of deafness on speech production before and after cochlear implantation (A)

Mary Joe Osberger

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 88, Issue S1, pp. S192-S193 (1990); (2 pages)

Online Publication Date: 14 Aug 2005

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Broad phonetic transcriptions of speech samples were compared for 4‐ to 7‐yr old children who had congenital deafness or acquired deafness during the first 3 yr of life. Analysis of the data revealed limited phonetic repertoires for all children. The diversity of the phonetic repertoires increased as the age of onset of deafness increased. With few exceptions, however, the sounds produced by the children with acquired deafness were ones that appeared to have been developed prior to the time that these children lost their hearing. A subset of children subsequently received a single‐ or multichannel cochlear implant. Children with acquired deafness continued to show superior speech production abilities following implantation even though there was no significant difference between the speech perception abilities of these children and those of the children with congenital hearing loss. [Work supported by NIH‐NIDCD.]
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Preliminary studies on a bilateral cochlear implant user (A)

R. van Hoesel, Y. C. Tong, R. D. Hollow, J. M. Huigen, and G. M. Clark

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 88, Issue S1, pp. S193-S193 (1990); (1 page) | Cited 1 time

Online Publication Date: 14 Aug 2005

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A series of preliminary psychophysical and speech perception studies have been completed for a bilateral cochlear implant patient. The patient was implanted with a second cochlear implant after 5 yr experience as a monaural implant user. The patient appears to experience some, but not all of the effects of binaural hearing observed in acoustic stimulation. For an approximate matching of the places of stimulation on the two sides, the subject usually reported a single percept when the two sides were simultaneously stimulated. Lateralization was strongly influenced by amplitude differences between the two sides, but only weakly by interaural time delays. Interaural time‐delay JNDs were large and were consistent with lateralization results. The amount of bilateral loundness summation for electrical stimulation was similar to that for acoustic stimulation in normally hearing subjects. Central masking was observed to be a function of the degree of place mismatch between the two sides. Preliminary speech testing has been completed. The subject used two independent, but identical speech processors (combined into one unit). The binaural advantage was observed particularly in noise.
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Dorsal cochlear nucleus responses to electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve (A)

Stephen J. O'Leary, Yit C. Tong, and Graeme M. Clark

J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Volume 88, Issue S1, pp. S193-S193 (1990); (1 page)

Online Publication Date: 14 Aug 2005

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Extracellular events of single units were studied in response to acoustical and electrical stimuli in the barbiturate anaesthetized cat. The electrical stimuli were biphasic current pulses, 100–200 μs/phase, delivered at 100–400 pulses per second (pps) via a bipolar electrode implanted into the scala tympani. The first group of units, group 1, generated action potentials 1.6–2.4 ms following an electrical pulse, while the latency for group 2 was 2.4–4.8 ms. In both groups, the spontaneous activity and the response to a pure tone was commonly suppressed between 2.5–3.75 ms following an electrical pulse. It is possible that groups 1 and 2 received mono‐ and di‐synaptically mediated excitatory inputs, respectively, and a disynaptically mediated inhibitory input. Both groups commonly generated action potentials at a second latency between 3.75–10 ms, which may have been due to long latency monosynaptically mediated or disynaptically mediated excitatory inputs. There was a difference in discharge rate between acoustic noise stimulation and electrical stimulation at high current levels for group 2, but not for group 1, suggesting temporal interaction between excitatory and inhibitory drives.
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