A MULTIMEDIA SPEECH LEARNING-SYSTEM FOR THE HEARING-IMPAIRED

The lack (or limited amount) of audio feedback for many persons with h earing disabilities greatly reduces the quality of speech development and use. Current methodologies for the teaching speech techniques are relatively primitive, and generally require the active participation o f a therapist. This makes essential practice difficult, time consuming , and expensive for the student. However, using multimedia technology, it is possible to amplify the efforts of the teachers and students fo r improving the quality of speech. This paper presents a multimedia vi sualization system that augments the limited hearing capabilities of h earing impaired persons using visual and tactile feedback approaches a nd provides alternate representations of sound for increasing speech c apabilities and reduced learning time. The proposed system has the cap ability of not only decreasing the learning time for many persons, but can also be adopted for teaching young children correct speech patter ns through the use of speech learning ''games'' based on the system.