Using Audemes as a Learning Medium for the Visually Impaired

In this paper we demonstrate the utility of short, nonverbal sound symbols—called “audemes”—in the encoding and recalling of text-based educational materials. In weekly meetings over a school year with blind and visually impaired pre-college students, we explored their capacity for long-term memory of individual audemes, audeme sequences, and textual content presented in conjunction with these. Through interviews and group discussions, we also explored the ability of these students to create intuitive narratives enabling memory of complex audemes and series of audemes. Further, we explored the mnemonic power of positive affect in audemes, and the impact of thematic association of information-to-audeme. Our results showed that the use of audemes can improve encoding and recall of educational content in the visually impaired population. The ultimate goal of our work is implementation of an “acoustic interface” allowing users to access a database of audemes and associated text-to-speech content.