Deaf and Hearing Children's Performance on a Tactual Perception Battery

Abstract

Sum7nary.-A battery of tactual sensitivity tests was administered to 300 deaf and hearing children and adolescents. The tests included vibrotactile and two-point sensitivity on several areas of the hand, gap-detection using two stimulation techniques, roughness discrimination, pattern discrimination, and crossmodal object identification. Measures included sensory thresholds, correct discrimination, errors, and in some cases, response latencies. Deaf youngsters were more sensitive than their hearing counterparts with vibrotactile and two-point measures. On most remaining tasks, deaf and hearing Ss' performance accuracies did not differ, although hearing Ss performed faster on all timed tasks. Improvements with age were evident with both speed and accuracy measures for several tasks. Results were discussed as to deaflhearing differences, and reading achievement scores, active versus passive touch, developmental changes, and relations among the tactual tasks and measures of the battery. The findings strongly suggested that different measures of tactual sensitivity tap quite different sensory and perceptual abilities.

Identifying objects by touch: An “expert system”

“…Some extant studies suggest, in agreement with this reasoning, that haptic identification of common objects is quite accurate (Bigelow, 1981;Hoop, 1971;Schiff & Dytell, 1972;Simpkins, 1979). However, those investigations do not provide a general assessmentof haptic identification capabilities, because of various limitationsusing very young subjects, a small sample of objects, or a task other than identification per se.…”

Multisensory processing in children with cochlear implants

“…This finding suggests that children with hearing loss may show enhanced processing of spatial information, thus supporting the compensation hypothesis. As mentioned earlier, previous investigations of adults and children with congenital hearing loss have shown superior skin sensitivities and tactile discrimination in comparison to normal controls [12,13]. The work by Levanen and Hamdorf documented significantly better performance of congenitally deaf adults than their normal controls in a tactile discrimination task that involved differentiating between two sounds varying in frequency that were applied to a plastic tube held in their hands.…”

“…Specifically, when compared to their normalhearing counterparts, adults with hearing loss were better at detecting the onset and direction of the movement of a peripheral stimulus and faster at directing attention toward a visual stimulus in peripheral space [8,11]. Similarly, when compared to normal controls, enhanced skin sensitivity and tactile discrimination abilities have been documented in children and adults with congenital hearing loss [12,13]. In general, these findings allude to strengths in the processing of spatial information.…”

Measures of tactual detection and temporal order resolution in congenitally deaf and normal-hearing adults

“…Previous studies of tactual perception in deaf children have suggested some degree of enhanced performance, relative to normal-hearing controls, on a variety of tasks ͑e.g., Chakravarty, 1968;Schiff and Dytell, 1972͒, including twopoint discrimination and line-orientation discrimination. Cranney and Ashton ͑1982͒ reported enhanced tactile spatial discrimination in deaf subjects, relative to normal-hearing controls, in various age groups.…”