Tactual Hearing Experiment with Deaf and Hearing Subjects

In two experiments with a tactual vocoder it was discovered that both hearing and deaf subjects could learn to discriminate between words that were minimally different and could attend to other prosodic features of language such as pitch and stress. Subjects were tested regularly on word identification. During the tests, the subjects neither looked at the trainer nor received any information other than that transmitted through the tactual vocoder. One deaf subject achieved a tactual vocabulary of 150 words and had a new word mastery rate increase of 46 times during the 48 week training period.