356 ILLINOIS STATE ACADEMY OF SCIENCE 



TACTUAL LNTERPKETATION OF OEAL SPEECH 



Robert Gault, Northwestern University 



In a paper read before the American Psychological 

 Association a year and more ago I stated that a subject 

 in our laboratory at Northwestern University had 

 learned to recognize seven spoken words when he had no 

 criteria to go by excepting the vibrations of the speaker's 

 vocal apparatus conducted through an air column in a 

 tube 14 feet long to the palm of the subject's hand. In 

 May, 1923, I added a footnote to the paper when proof 

 was being corrected for the Journal of Abnormal Phy- 

 chology and Social Psychology, saying that up to that 

 time 34 words had been learned, together with a great 

 number of sentences made up of those words in various 

 combinations. In fact he was able to get the sense of any 

 such sentence. Furthermore, he had learned to distin- 

 guish high and low tones provided there was a difference 

 of an octave at least between them. This result was ob- 

 tained in the course of 78 periods, one a day. Actual 

 practice never occupied more than 35 minutes at a sitting. 



The subject in this case was a normal hearing young 

 man, a sophomore in the University. The situation was 

 so arranged that he could not hear. The speaking tube 

 I have referred to extended through two walls and the 

 intervening room. At the subject's end it terminated in 

 a double pine box, the outside dimensions of which are 2 

 by 2 by 2y 2 feet approximately. The space between the 

 outer and the inner wall, five inches deep, is packed with 

 cotton w r aste. At the front end of the box is an aperture 

 surrounded by a rubber collar. 



The subject thrusts his hand through the aperture and 

 holds his palm closely over the end of the tube. In this 

 position the rubber collar grips the forearm and the 

 whole apparatus is-, for our purposes, sound proof. Ad- 

 ditional precautions against hearing were introduced as 

 follows : — First, the experimenter muffled his face in a 

 feather cushion and spoke through a narrow aperture 

 in it into a funnel upon his end of the tube. Second, the 

 subject plugged his ears with soft putty and cotton bat- 

 ting, covered his ears with a heavy bandage, and kept an 



