Acquisition of a tactile-alone vocabulary by normally hearing users of the Tickle Talker(TM)

Tactile-alone word recognition training was provided to six normally hearing users of the Tickle Talker(TM), an electrotactile speech perception device. A mean group tactile-alone vocabulary of 31 words was learned in 12 h of training. These results were comparable to, or superior to, those reported for other tactile devices and Tadoma. With increased training the group became faster at learning tactually new words, which were introduced in small training sets. However, as their tactile-alone vocabulary grew, subjects required more training time to reach the pass criterion when evaluated on their recognition of their whole vocabulary list. A maximum possible vocabulary size was not established. The application of tactile-alone training with hearing-impaired users of the device is discussed.