Analysis of a synthetic Tadoma system as a multidimensional tactile display

The Tadoma method is a means of speech reception based on tactile monitoring of the articulatory process. A "synthetic" Tadoma system, involving an artificial face with six facial actions, has been developed as a first-order approximation to the natural Tadoma system. Experiments were conducted to explore the information-transmission characteristics of the synthetic Tadoma system in terms of the four facial movements it incorporates: upper lip in-out, lower lip in-out, lower lip up-down, and jaw up-down movements. Discrimination experiments showed that the just-noticeable difference associated with each movement is about 9% of the reference displacement. One-dimensional (1-D) absolute identification experiments produced, on the average, 1.6 bits of information transfer. Four dimensional (4-D) identification experiments produced information transfers in the range of 3-4 bits. Of the four dimensions considered, performance on the lower lip up-down movement was most affected, and performance on the jaw up-down movement was least affected, by simultaneous roving movements on the other dimensions. As a result of the interaction among the movement channels, the sum of the 1-D information transfers exceeds the 4-D information transfer. However, the sum of the 1-D information transfers obtained from tests with roving parameters is approximately equal to the 4-D information transfer (possibly exemplifying a "generalized information-transfer additivity law"). In general, both the discrimination and identification results appear unexceptional and, hence, the reception of facial movement information by itself does not appear to account for the extraordinary success of the Tadoma method.