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

A computer based speech training program named SIM (Speech Illumina Mentor) has been developed targeted mainly for use by young school-aged hearing impaired children. The program has two major components: a training module which presents the child with examples of stored articulations and a practice module which features a voice recognition system to evaluate elicited productions in a game format. By monitoring the progress of speech production and creating target templates that lie between the subject´s current voice profile and the normal expected profile, the care giver can gradually bring the subject in the direction of normal profile. This process is termed successive target approximation approach. In a study with fifteen adults and twelve normal hearing children. The system´s operation was found to be reliable. The effectiveness of SIM in teaching simple syllables to seven profoundly hearing impaired children, has been reported in a separate paper