Investigation on effect of prosody in finger braille

Finger braille is one of the communication methods for the deaf blind, which seems to be the most suited medium for real-time communication by its speed and accuracy in transmitting characters. We hypothesize that the prosody information exists in the time structure of finger braille typing. Prosody is the paralinguistic information that has functions to transmit the sentence structure, prominence, emotions and other form of information in real-time communication. In this research, we performed a cognition experiment on 12 subjects with a simulated output to confirm the effect of prosody in the time structure. As a result, the percentages of questions answered correctly were 79 % for the prosody simulated output and 65 % for the monotonous output. The result shows the possibility that the prosody information of finger braille can be applied to the assistive technologies for deaf-blind people's communication.