A Framework for Speechreading Acquisition Tools

At least 360 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss that frequently causes difficulties in day-to-day conversations. Hearing aids often fail to offer enough benefits and have low adoption rates. However, people with hearing loss find that speechreading can improve their understanding during conversation. Speechreading (often called lipreading) refers to using visual information about the movements of a speaker's lips, teeth, and tongue to help understand what they are saying. Speechreading is commonly used by people with all severities of hearing loss to understand speech, and people with typical hearing also speechread (albeit subconsciously) to help them understand others. However, speechreading is a skill that takes considerable practice to acquire. Publicly-funded speechreading classes are sometimes provided, and have been shown to improve speechreading acquisition. However, classes are only provided in a handful of countries around the world and students can only practice effectively when attending class. Existing tools have been designed to help improve speechreading acquisition, but are often not effective because they have not been designed within the context of contemporary speechreading lessons or practice. To address this, in this thesis I present a novel speechreading acquisition framework that can be used to design Speechreading Acquisition Tools (SATs) - a new type of technology to improve speechreading acquisition.Comment: PhD Thesis, supervised by Dr David R. Flatl

Beyond Accessibility:Lifting Perceptual Limitations for Everyone

We propose that accessibility research can lay the foundation for technology that can be used to augment the perception of everyone. To show how this can be achieved, we present three case studies of our research in which we demonstrate our approaches for impaired colour vision, situational visual impairments and situational hearing impairment.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

Navigating Mainstream Environments: The Impact of Modality Selection for Children with Cochlear Implants

Communication is a fundamental component in education. For children who are deaf, cochlear implantation provides access to spoken communication; however, that access is different from that which typically hearing students experience. Because cochlear implants (CIs) have made it possible for many deaf individuals to communicate through spoken language, controversy exists in the education field as to which modes of communication should be considered for children who are deaf and have CIs in mainstream classrooms. This dissertation discusses a qualitative multi-case study that was conducted using ethnographic methods in order to examine the communication practices of two students with cochlear implants in a mainstream educational setting where spoken English and sign language were presented in tandem throughout most of the school day. This study employs Ethnography of Communication (Hymes, 1972), Multiliteracies (New London Group, 1996) and Social Semiotics (Kress, 2013) as theoretical frameworks and Hymes’ SPEAKING model (Kaplan-Weinger & Ullman, 2015), multimodalities (Kress, 2000, 2013) and Deaf Gain (Bauman & Murray, 2014) as tools for analysis in order to examine these students’ modality selection in different contexts and under various environmental conditions. This study also analyzes how these various modalities impact these students’ educational access, receptive and expressive communication, communicative practices, and identity development. Results of this study indicate that audition was the primary modality utilized by the focal participants, but they used their agency to select various combinations of modalities to support their access to spoken language. While they may identify as hearing, Deaf, or “DeaF” (McIlroy & Storbeck, 2011), the impact of their agentic modality selections may promote a “Multimodal User” identity

Book Reviews

non

Phonological and orthographic processing in deaf readers during recognition of written and fingerspelled words in Spanish and English

The role of phonological and orthographic access during word recognition, as well as its developmental trajectory in deaf readers is still a matter of debate. This thesis examined how phonological and orthographic information is used during written and fingerspelled word recognition by three groups of deaf readers: 1) adult readers of English, 2) adult and 3) young readers of Spanish. I also investigated whether the size of the orthographic and phonological effects was related to reading skill and other related variables: vocabulary, phonological awareness, speechreading and fingerspelling abilities. A sandwich masked priming paradigm was used to assess automatic phonological (pseudohomophone priming; Experiments 1-3) and orthographic (transposed-letter priming; Experiments 4–6) effects in all groups during recognition of single written words. To examine fingerspelling processing, pseudohomophone (Experiments 7–9) and transposed-letter (Experiments 10-12) effects were examined in lexical decision tasks with fingerspelled video stimuli. Phonological priming effects were found for adult deaf readers of English. Interestingly, for deaf readers of Spanish only those young readers with a small vocabulary size showed phonological priming. Conversely, orthographic masked priming was found in adult deaf readers of English and Spanish as well as young deaf readers with large vocabulary size. Reading ability was only correlated to the orthographic priming effect (in accuracy) in the adult deaf readers of English. Fingerspelled pseudohomophones took longer than control pseudowords to reject as words in the adult deaf readers of English and in the young deaf readers of Spanish with a small vocabulary, suggesting sensitivity to speech phonology in these groups. The findings suggest greater reliance on phonology by less skilled deaf readers of both Spanish and English. Additionally, they suggest greater reliance on phonology during both word and fingerspelling processing in deaf readers of a language with a deeper orthography (English), than by expert readers of a shallow orthography (Spanish)

Recommendations for a preparatory English language program for hearing-impaired college students

The purpose of this research was to develop recommendations for a preparatory English language program for hearing-impaired college students for Clark County Community College, Las Vegas, Nevada, and other concerned colleges that do not presently offer such a program. A questionnaire designed to elicit program information regarding the goals and objectives, instructional practices and procedures, assessment and evaluation, and major problems and solutions was developed. The questionnaire was sent to directors of current preparatory hearing-impaired English language programs in two-year, liberal arts colleges; An analysis of the data received revealed a good deal of diversity as well as considerable similarity in the goals and objectives, practices and procedures, and problems and solutions of the 35 responding programs. A synthesis and discussion of the data considered the relative merits and detriments, advantages and disadvantages of current program goals and objectives, practices and procedures. Based on these considerations, recommendations for a preparatory English language program for hearing-impaired college students were presented

Reading in the language arts for primary deaf children

Thesis (Ed.M.)--Boston Universit