Weisenberger J M, Miller J D
Central Institute for the Deaf, St. Louis, Missouri 63110.
J Acoust Soc Am. 1987 Sep;82(3):906-16. doi: 10.1121/1.395289.
Devices that convert sound patterns into patterns of vibrotactile stimulation have been shown in laboratory and clinical studies to enable persons to appreciate many aspects of the acoustic environment, and thus are of potential benefit to deaf persons. In the present article, a framework is outlined for describing normal listening situations as a hierarchy of tasks requiring increasingly complex analysis of the acoustic waveform, including sound detection, environmental sound identification, syllable rhythm and stress categorization, phoneme and word identification, and comprehension of connected speech. The types of benefits provided by tactile aids in each of these tasks are exemplified using data from studies of single-channel commercially available devices and multichannel tactile vocoders in our own and other laboratories. The discussion of these data addresses such issues as the features of the acoustic environment that can or should be transmitted through a tactile aid, the differences in the information transmitted by commercially available versus experimental laboratory devices, the comparison of tactile aids and cochlear implants, and the technical problems that remain to be overcome in the design and evaluation of improved vibrotactile aids.
在实验室和临床研究中已表明，将声音模式转换为振动触觉刺激模式的设备能使人们感知声学环境的诸多方面，因此对聋人具有潜在益处。在本文中，概述了一个框架，用于将正常听力情境描述为一个任务层次结构，该层次结构需要对声学波形进行越来越复杂的分析，包括声音检测、环境声音识别、音节节奏和重音分类、音素和单词识别以及连贯语音理解。利用我们自己和其他实验室对单通道商用设备和多通道触觉声码器的研究数据，举例说明了触觉辅助设备在这些任务中的每种所提供的益处类型。对这些数据的讨论涉及诸如可通过触觉辅助设备传输或应传输的声学环境特征、商用设备与实验实验室设备传输信息的差异、触觉辅助设备与人工耳蜗的比较以及在改进的振动触觉辅助设备的设计和评估中仍有待克服的技术问题等问题。
