The design and evduation of an innovative vibrotactile aid for the deaf which is based on 'Linear Predictive Coding &PC) is described. The device utilizes an 80386 microprocessor and a TMS32OC30 floating point digital signal processor. The signal processing algorithms estimate the fundamental frequency and fist two formant peak values of voiced segments and reduce spatiotemporal masking during unvoiced segments. The device is compared against a commercially available vocoder using multiple tokens of natural speech. Results show higher perceptual scores for the Lpc-based device.