THE PROBLEM
It has been demonstrated repeatedly that certain vibratory patterns of spoken language can be identified by the senses of touch and vibration. For example, one of us (R. H. G.)1 has shown that deaf persons, or normally hearing observers having hearing eliminated, can learn to recognize vibratory patterns having the qualities of vowels and diphthongs when these patterns are communicated to the finger-tips by means of the Gault phonotactor.2 Weichbrodt3 has found the same thing to be true for certain consonantal qualities. Roberts4 has found that his observers after training could discriminate between two pitches when the difference was less than a semitone and when the base was 400 double vibrations. Most significant of all is the finding5 that two of a group of six deaf pupils (after intensive training in the use of the Gault phonotactor) were able to understand the gist of a short story by