Word: cramer
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...complex. Its most immediate implications are in the field of education for the blind. When reading Braille, a blind person can achieve a maximum rate of 125 words per minute, provided he is skilled enough to use both hands. The average Braille reading rate is only 90 w.p.m. With Cramer's speeded speech program, however, blind children could listen to compressed speech lectures through earphones in languagelab situations at anywhere from 475 to 600 w.p.m. In the future, new techniques may raise intelligibility rates to 1000 w.p.m. A speeded speech program has already been instituted on an experimental basis...
...Cramer is currently working on a machine which would make it possible for a blind student to regulate the speed of the tape he is listening to. A brighter student could progress according to his own ability, unhindered by the rest of the class...
...blind, however, comprise only a half of one percent of the nation's handicapped. There are those who are not legally blind, but who nonetheless have poor eyesight and experience difficulty reading. For these people, Cramer's technique makes talking book programs more practical. WGBH in Boston is considering broadcasting novels -- best sellers and popular mysteries -- in compressed speech two days each week...
...Cramer has been perfecting his present system for a year. He first became interested in human communication back in 1960, during a political controversy in his home town. "If a politician stood up at a bridge meeting and cried 'Wolf!' it was amazing to see how quickly the public responded, while they reacted hardly at all to authoritative information on the printed page," Cramer observed. He concluded that auditory information was far more effective than written...
...Cramer didn't use dogs in his experiments, but rather 160 Cliffies over a one-year period. The girls listened through earphones to speech varying in speed from 450 to 930 w.p.m., and were asked to write down whatever they could understand from the tapes. Cramer didn't use any Harvard men in his testing. "I wanted to see what could be achieved under optimum conditions," he said. "Women have been shown to have a consistently higher verbal ability than men," who, he added quickly, "are usually better at math...