Evaluation of speech illumina mentor (SIM) for teaching speech to the hearing impaired

A software program named SIM (Speech Illumina Mentor) was developed based on the use of dynamic visual physiological information about speech articulators, targeted mainly for young hearing impaired children. The rationale of this research is that visual information about internal and external articulators may be able to substitute for auditory feedback in speech-language acquisition. The design and operation of SIM has been reported in a companion paper. Seven profoundly hearing-impaired children participated in this study to evaluate the effectiveness of SIM for training on vowel production. The subjects were trained individually on the system for |a|, |i| and |u| vowels for six weeks. After each training session, each child was elicited for fifteen speech samples in CV (Consonant-Vowel) and CVC (Consonant-Vowel-Consonant) format, containing the practiced vowels in different context. These speech samples were presented to a group of eight listeners for their evaluation. The overall post intelligibility performance of six out of seven subjects across all three vowels, scored at lease 13% better than their pre-training performances. The best performance showed an improvement from 58% to 93%.