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In Tadoma, speech is received by placing a hand on the talker's face and monitoring actions associated with speech production. Our initial research has documented the speech perception, speech production, and linguistic abilities of deaf-blind individuals highly trained in Tadoma. This research has demonstrated that good speech reception can be achieved through the tactile sense: Performance is roughly equivalent to that of normals listening in noise or babble with a signal-to-noise ratio in the range 0-6 dB. It appears that the principal cues employed are lip movement, jaw movement, oral airflow, and laryngeal vibration, and that the errors which occur are caused primarily by inadequate information on tongue position. Our current research includes (1) learning of Tadoma by normal subjects with simulated deafness and blindness, (2) augmenting Tadoma with a supplemental tactile display of tongue position, and (3) developing a synthetic Tadoma system in which signals recorded from a talker's face are used to drive an artificial face. This research is expected to increase our understanding of Tadoma and its relation to other tactile communication methods, show that performance obtained through Tadoma does not represent the ultimate limits of the tactile sense, and provide a research tool for studying transformations of Tadoma.

The linguistic and cognitive development of 26 premature and 27 full-term infants was studied longitudinally over the first 3 years of life. Infants in the premature population included 12 who were below 1500 g in birthweight and an even larger number with “at risk” signs. Language samples were collected in the home approximately every other month, the children were given experimenter-designed tests periodically, and mothers were asked to keep diaries of their children’s lexical development. The children were given standardized tests as they exited the study. Cognitive development was also measured periodically. The patterns of lexical and cognitive development of the prematures did not differ markedly from those of full-term infants. There were no significant differences between the prematures as a whole and the full-term infants on standard language test measures as they exited from the study. There were significant differences between the very low birthweight and full-term infants on two of the exit measures. However, the performance of the very low birthweight infants was well within the range of normal on these two measures. The nature of the study and the factors that might have led to lack of differences between the two groups are discussed.

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