Tracking skill of a deaf person with long-term tactile aid experience: a case study

This paper describes a case study of a single deaf individual who has been using a vibrotactile aid for approximately 13 years. He has acquired the ability to lip-read speakers in three languages, using the speech-analyzing device that he and his collaborators have developed. The report describes his communicative abilities with and without the aid in his native language, which is Russian, and in English and Hebrew. When he was tested with the De Filippo-Scott connected-discourse tracking technique, the aid produced a considerable improvement in performance over that for unaided lipreading. The amount of improvement was a function of several factors, in particular his unaided lipreading rates for the different languages.