Blamey P J, Cowan R S, Alcantara J I, Whitford L A, Clark G M
Department of Otolaryngology, University of Melbourne, Royal Victorian Eye and Ear Hospital, Australia.
J Rehabil Res Dev. 1989 Winter;26(1):15-24.
Four normally-hearing subjects were trained and tested with all combinations of a highly-degraded auditory input, a visual input via lipreading, and a tactile input using a multichannel electrotactile speech processor. The speech perception of the subjects was assessed with closed sets of vowels, consonants, and multisyllabic words; with open sets of words and sentences, and with speech tracking. When the visual input was added to any combination of other inputs, a significant improvement occurred for every test. Similarly, the auditory input produced a significant improvement for all tests except closed-set vowel recognition. The tactile input produced scores that were significantly greater than chance in isolation, but combined less effectively with the other modalities. The addition of the tactile input did produce significant improvements for vowel recognition in the auditory-tactile condition, for consonant recognition in the auditory-tactile and visual-tactile conditions, and in open-set word recognition in the visual-tactile condition. Information transmission analysis of the features of vowels and consonants indicated that the information from auditory and visual inputs were integrated much more effectively than information from the tactile input. The less effective combination might be due to lack of training with the tactile input, or to more fundamental limitations in the processing of multimodal stimuli.
四名听力正常的受试者接受了训练，并使用高度退化的听觉输入、通过唇读的视觉输入以及使用多通道电触觉语音处理器的触觉输入的所有组合进行测试。通过元音、辅音和多音节词的封闭集；单词和句子的开放集以及语音跟踪来评估受试者的语音感知。当视觉输入添加到任何其他输入组合中时，每次测试都有显著改善。同样，除了封闭集元音识别外，听觉输入在所有测试中都产生了显著改善。触觉输入单独产生的分数显著高于随机水平，但与其他模态的组合效果较差。在听觉-触觉条件下，触觉输入的添加确实对元音识别有显著改善；在听觉-触觉和视觉-触觉条件下，对辅音识别有显著改善；在视觉-触觉条件下，对开放集单词识别有显著改善。元音和辅音特征的信息传输分析表明，来自听觉和视觉输入的信息比来自触觉输入的信息整合得更有效。这种不太有效的组合可能是由于缺乏对触觉输入的训练，或者是由于多模态刺激处理中更基本的限制。
