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A battery of assessments to determine the potential contribution of tactual aids to the acoustic perception and speech identification of young deaf children was developed. The tasks were developed so that they could be implemented with standard audiometric equipment and applied to subjects of varying age and to different types of tactual aids. Illustrative results from four profoundly hearing-impaired chiidren (aged 8 to 10 years) showed that tactual vocoders allowed detection of high frequencies that were not available to the subjects through aided audition. In most cases with these subjects, performance on simple detection and discrimination tasks showed facilitative effects with tactual vocoders. Facilitative effects were further evidenced in more complex phonemic identification tasks for all subjects. Tables, figures, and 11 references are provided. (DB) * Itiproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document.