In an ongoing project 12 hard of hearing preschool children in a signing nursery school get multi-sensory stimulation of voice, speech and sounds from surroundings. The tools are IBM's Speech Viewer, a vibrotectile chair and hearing aids. The children participate voluntarily and individually, about 2-4 times a month and about 20 minutes each time. They are interested and motivated when they play and practice. All of them rapidly learnt to connect their own sound production, the picture on the screen and the vibrotactile sensation from the chair. All children have successively normalised the loudness of voice, seven can control loudness and pitch and are practising skill-building in the speech. The effects of the loudness are generalised to the daily life for five children. Awareness of and discriminating computer sounds from surroundings with photos of the sound source seems to stimulate them and they are more sensitive and engaged in such sounds in daily life. The most loved and important tool seems to be the vibrotactile chair. Without it, their motivation decrease.
Cite as: Jonsson, I. (1998) Multi-sensory stimulation of voice, speech and sounds from surroundings in hard of hearing preschool children. Proc. ETRW on Speech Technology in Language Learning (STiLL), 159-162
@inproceedings{jonsson98_still,
author={Ingrid Jonsson},
title={{Multi-sensory stimulation of voice, speech and sounds from surroundings in hard of hearing preschool children}},
year=1998,
booktitle={Proc. ETRW on Speech Technology in Language Learning (STiLL)},
pages={159--162}
}