Thai Language E-Training For The Hard Of Hearing

People who are hard of hearing usually have some amount of difficulty in uttering words due to the lack of auditory feedback. Speech training is needed for them to perform reasonably effective verbal communication. To learn how to utter a sound, most hard-of-hearing learners rely on lip-reading in order to imitate how the sound is produced. Traditionally, such training needs to be done on a one-to-one, face-toface basis, especially for children. There are some computer programs facilitating this type of training. However, they are generally not well-matched with the phonemes of Thai language. This paper aims at describing the concept of an e-training tool that helps hardof-hearing children learn and practice to utter simple Thai words more correctly. The concept of this e-training tool emphasizes on the use of technologies, such as speech recognition and computer animation, to eliminate limitations of the traditional therapist-based speech training on three aspects: Teaching, Training, and Tracking.

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