What is Cued Speech?

Human languages are made up of distinct parts. Spoken English uses classes of speech sounds, called phonemes, as the building blocks of language.

These building blocks have distinctive features which make them unique. For example, a hearing person can generally tell the difference between the sounds /m/ /b/ and /p/ evern when spoken in isolation.

These distinct sounds can be used in various combinations to make unique words:

Mom

bomb

pop

Bob

mob

mop

These speech sounds are produced differently so they have unique acoustic properties. For instance, when saying /b/ one's vocal cords should vibrate, but when saying /p/ the vocal cords do not vibrate.

To the deaf child however, these acoustic qualities may not perceivable. The subtle difference in voicing (vocal cords vibrating or not) cannot be heard. Likewise, these differences cannot be seen. If you were to look in a mirror and silently say the sentence, "Please write the word __________" (alternately filling in the blank with several of the examples above), you would see that each of the examples looks the same. The qualities that make these building blocks unique is their acoustic qualities. To a profundly deaf child, the acoustic qualities are lost and the visual information may be ambiguous.

This issue is at the heart of the language development and literacy problems which have plagued deaf children for centuries. Signed languages employ a natural and unambiguous visual mode for conveying information (through signing). However, spoken languages lacked such a visual counterpart. Attempts to use signs to convey spoken languages have not been as successful as hoped.

In 1966, Dr. R. Orin Cornett set out to solve the literacy problem for deaf children. Unlike those who created sign systems, Cornett decided to address this problem at the building block, or phonemic level.

His approach, called Cued Speech, uses handshapes to reintroduce distinctive features to English phonology. Rather than acoustic features, visual cues are used uniquely identify each phoneme. Instead of voicing being used to differentiate /b/ and /p/, the phonemes are assigned different handshapes which clearly identify the phoneme (and all others) while whole English is conveyed in real time.

Cued Speech is not just a method of disambiguating isolated speech sounds. One can cue words, sentences, conversations, speeches, etc. in real-time. Cueing prevents English from being solely a spoken language, moving it into the realm of natural, visual languages.

Cued Speech itself is not a language. This fact is often the source of much confusion and animosity towards the system. However, it is worth noting that neither speech nor signing are languages either. Speech, itself, is merely a modality for producing language. A means to get language from one's mind into the physical world through an acoustic channel. Similarly, one can sign without communicating within a signed language. Signing, itself, is not a language but a means to get languages like American Sign Language from the mind of it's users out into the physical world, through a visual channel.

Speech, signing, and Cued Speech are modalities through which languages may be conveyed. Spoken languages, signed languages, and cued languages are all viable, natural human languages for human interaction.

Cued Speech is a simple system but when applied to a language (e.g. French, English, Spanish, etc) is a cued language which supports language development, literacy, and speechreading.