 Tactilator Training Study at The Lexington Center, Inc. The objective of the project has been to compare the amount of speechreading improvement provided by the Tactilator using two different microphone placements--a throat-contact microphone and a standard air microphone. Five postlingually deafened adults participated in the study. Two subjects dropped out before sufficient data was collected. Three subjects completed all sessions.* Although the initial protocol of the study included training issues, there was very little performance change over the sessions on any of the tests. Therefore, we will just look at the differences in performance among the different conditions. In the following text we will refer to these conditions as follows: SR Speechreading alone SR + Thr Speechreading plus throat mic SR + Air Speechreading plus air mic Two different speechreading tests were used: CUNY sentences: A sentence is read by a reader facing the subject. The subject repeats the sentence. The % correct words on a complete set of CUNY sentences is recorded. Each of the three subjects had 22 data points in each of the three conditions. Each data point is based on the percent correct words in a complete CUNY sentence list. KTH computerized tracking system: A reader reads a story, one phrase at a time. The subject repeats back what the reader said. Words or phrases are repeated until the subject gets the phrase completely correct. The tracking system collects a number of pieces of data, including the average words per minute repeated back correctly. Each subject had 33 data points in each of the three conditions. Each data point is the average tracking rate in words/minute based on a five-minute session. We have looked at the data separately for the three subjects who completed the study, getting similar results for each one. A brief synopsis of the results is: CUNY:All three subjects showed significant improvement when using the Tactilator. Two subjects improved in both the SR + Thr and SR + Air conditions and one subject in the SR + Thr condition only (The third subject showed improvement in SR + Air only at the 0.08 level of significance). KTH: One of the three individuals showed significant improvement in tracking rate; the other two only showed very slight improvement. However, the total tracking time in each condition was around 2.5 hours. Previous experience in tracking training suggests that more training time is needed. Although there was not much data for subject 4, this individual's scores mocked those of the other three subjects in that CUNY scores were numerically higher for the TLTR . The average scores for the subjects on each of the tests are given in the table at the end of this section.The statistical results of the Analyes are shown below. FORMAL ANALYSES -THREE CONDITIONS All analyses described below are Analyses of Variance on the three conditions (SR, SR+ Thr, SR+ Air) followed by Planned Comparisons comparing the condition SR with each of the other two conditions.The following two tables show means and F values for the three subjects for both CUNY and KTH data: CUNY Sentences-Each subject had 22 data points in each condition.
KTH-Each subject had 32 data points per condition:
* This data was generated as part of a SBIR grant number: R44DC02079 awarded to Audiological Engineering Corp. This experiment was performed at the Lexington Center Inc., Jackson Heights, NY. |
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