Life for a hearing-impaired person can be difficult in many ways. Having a hearing lossinvolves an increased risk of loneliness and exhaustion symptoms due to bad hearing. Not being able to hear everything, while talking with colleagues and eventually missing the punch line of a joke can lead to the feeling of social exclusion and not fitting in.The only thing that helps to restore the hearing of a hearing impaired is through hearing aids. But in many cases, even hearing aids do not help to cope with everyday life and in most cases, additional aids are needed. But does today's market for hearing aids solve the problems and needs of the user? How will a product work and look like to improve the life of a hearing-impaired?This project was about understanding how the hearing disorder affects daily life andidentifying the problems and needs of a hearing-impaired person.The project is based on a general design process and includes background studies on hearing impairment, questionnaire studies, interviews with the hearing impaired, market research, creative methods and analyses, and evaluation methods of ideas and concepts.The goal was to create a product that improves the everyday life of a hearing-impaired person.

In the hearing-loss community, sign language is a primary tool to communicate with people while there is a communication gap between hearing-loss people with normal hearing people. Sign language is different from spoken language. It has its own vocabulary and grammar. Recent works concentrate on the sign language video caption which consists of sign language recognition and sign language translation. Continuous sign language recognition, which can bridge the communication gap, is a challenging task because of the weakly supervised ordered annotations where no frame-level label is provided. To overcome this problem, connectionist temporal classification (CTC) is the most widely used method. However, CTC learning could perform badly if the extracted features are not good. For better feature extraction, this thesis presents the novel self-attention-based fully-inception (SAFI) networks for vision-based end-to-end continuous sign language recognition. Considering the length of sign words differs from each other, we introduce the fully inception network with different receptive fields to extract dynamic clip-level features. To further boost the performance, the fully inception network with an auxiliary classifier is trained with aggregation cross entropy (ACE) loss. Then the encoder of self-attention networks as the global sequential feature extractor is used to model the clip-level features with CTC. The proposed model is optimized by jointly training with ACE on clip-level feature learning and CTC on global sequential feature learning in an end-to-end fashion. The best method in the baselines achieves 35.6% WER on the validation set and 34.5% WER on the test set. It employs a better decoding algorithm for generating pseudo labels to do the EM-like optimization to fine-tune the CNN module. In contrast, our approach focuses on the better feature extraction for end-to-end learning. To alleviate the overfitting on the limited dataset, we employ temporal elastic deformation to triple the real-world dataset RWTH- PHOENIX-Weather 2014. Experimental results on the real-world dataset RWTH- PHOENIX-Weather 2014 demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach which achieves 31.7% WER on the validation set and 31.2% WER on the test set. Even though sign language recognition can, to some extent, help bridge the communication gap, it is still organized in sign language grammar which is different from spoken language. Unlike sign language recognition that recognizes sign gestures, sign language translation (SLT) converts sign language to a target spoken language text which normal hearing people commonly use in their daily life. To achieve this goal, this thesis provides an effective sign language translation approach which gains state-of-the-art performance on the largest real-life German sign language translation database, RWTH-PHOENIX-Weather 2014T. Besides, a direct end-to-end sign language translation approach gives out promising results (an impressive gain from 9.94 to 13.75 BLEU and 9.58 to 14.07 BLEU on the validation set and test set) without intermediate recognition annotations. The comparative and promising experimental results show the feasibility of the direct end-to-end SLT

The purpose df this paper was to evaluate the effectiveness of the Home Auditory Program of Project SKI*HI on the listening skills of its students during the years 1972-1975. The scores of two groups of children, as measured on the SKI*HI Listening Skills Scale were compared. The statistical evaluation indicated that: 1. Significant improvements in listening skills were demonstrated by one group of children during three to eleven months of treatment, and 2. The scores of this treated group were significantly superior to the non-treated group, despite a similarity in age and degree of hearing loss between the two groups.

Prepositions are not only important in functional syntax; they also relate meanings associated with the concepts of place and time (Washington & Naremore, 1978). Furthermore, prepositions are critical in such everyday activities as producing and comprehending directions, using maps and diagrams, and in the fields of mathematics and music (Cox & Richardson, 1985). Inefficient use or misuse of prepositional spatial terms may hinder a child's progress in many areas. Expressive acquisition of function words, which include prepositions, has been described as significantly delayed in the hearing impaired populations (Cooper & Rosenstein, 1966). The purpose of this study was to conduct a comparative preposition analysis between hearing impaired children using two different modes of communication. The question this researcher sought to answer was: Do 54 severely-to-profoundly hearing impaired children in this study using total communication differ in the expressive acquisition of 17 locative and directional prepositions from 35 hearing impaired children in a previous study (Warlick, 1983) using oral/aural communication?

This paper presents an exploratory case study focusing on the acquisition of information, through technologically efficient systems, by the hearing impaired. The multiple-case study was conducted during one school year with seven students participating. While a central question and propositions derived from that question guide the data collection and analysis, this is a hypothesis-building study. The purpose of the study was to generate questions to focus further research of a descriptive or explanatory format. One question, and the propositions generated by it, dominated this research: How do efficient acquisition systems in the classroom effect academic and social behavior, independent activities, or student, peer, and adult expectations? Three propositions directed the data collection/analysis of this research. As knowledge increases in students: (1) the rate of academic production will increase; (2) times of independent activities will be focused on productive projects; (3) self-concept will improve as measured by students, peers and adults. Six sources (documents, physical artifacts, archival records, interviews, direct observations, participant observation) were used to gather data for the analysis of the research project. The results of this study showed that the students who had only the disability of hearing impairment had significantly different experiences throughout this study than those who evidenced intellectual impairments. Generally, their work output was greater, increased more, and reflected a qualitative change. The data gathered from the unstructured activity periods also clearly show a dissimilar experience. The hearing impaired students "grew" into increasingly more productive behaviors while the other group showed, for all practical purposes, no change at all. The analysis of the third proposition was more problematical. The findings are not as clear as the first two propositions because the reporting and recording of data was subject to more interpretation. The indicators may support the proposition that increased learning has a positive effect on self-image. The results from this study have implications for current educational practices for hearing impaired: (1) Computer and video technology need a directedness not now evident. (2) Placement decisions should be based on expectations and achievements of the various populations served. (3) More sophisticated technology should be placed at the disposal of the classroom teacher.

Mild to Moderately Severe is an episodic memoir of a boy coming of age as a latch-key kid, living with a working single mother and partly raising himself, as a hearing impaired and depressed young adult, learning to navigate the culture with a strategy of faking it, as a nomad with seven mailing addresses before turning ten. It is an examination of accidental and cultivated loneliness, a narrative of a boy and later a man who is too adept at adapting to different environments, a reflection on relationships and popularity and a need for attention and love that clashes with a need to walk through unfamiliar neighborhoods alone. "Mild to moderately severe" is a diagnosed level of my hearing impairment. It is also the level of clinical depression I'm supposed to have been suffering since I was a preteen. It is also an answer to the question, "How was your day?"

M. S.

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A computer program which pairs auditory stimuli with visual stimuli was developed for the purpose of providing auditory training for the hearing impaired. It utilizes a Texas Instruments 99 /4A computer and Extended BASIC programming language which allows considerable graphics and sound capability. The lessons make full use of the sixteen colors available and the sound is provided three ways: Texas Instruments speech synthesizer, the computer itself (musical tones and noise), and by tape recorder which is controlled by the computer. Focus of the lessons, which are designed for children ages three to five, is awareness of sound, environmental sounds, discrimination of changes in pitch and duration of sound, recognition of rhythm, and early language learning. At this beginning level, the program is primarily teaching by pairing the stimuli repeatedly, but there are some higher level tasks requiring input from the child to identify a stimulus.