Annotated Bibliography of Research on Cued Speech

This experiment was aimed at establishing whether the internal representations of the words derived from Cued Speech have properties that allow for the identification of these words from their orthographic representation when encountered for the first time. In their introduction, the authors stress the importance of the "alphabetic principle," by which the alphabet provides a phonological recoding which allows the identification of words encountered for the first time, if they are in the lexicon of spoken words already known to the reader. They stress that deaf subjects in general do not have access to this technique, since their phonological representations are, for an important part, based on lipreading, and are ambiguous. Cued Speech is aimed at reproducing an unambiguous phonological message, leading to an unambiguous internal phonological system. For the study, 18 children from L'Ecole Intégrée, aged 6 to 12 years, were selected. Fourteen were profoundly deaf, and four had a severe hearing loss. The subjects each had at least two years practice with the use of Cued Speech. They were taught "experimental words", new to them, with Cued Speech and pairing with video pictures. For each a control word, similar in orthographic characteristics, and familiar to the subjects, was also used, for comparison of results. Each test presented a picture, to associate with one of four written words, the correct word and three distractors: a word similar in appearance on the lips, a pseudo-word also visually similar on the mouth, and an unrelated word. Included were a pretest, a first posttest within 24 hours, and a posttest 18 to 25 days later. RESULTS: (1) For all three groups of subjects, there was an important increase in the percentage of correct responses (more than a doubling) from the pretest to the posttests, for the experimental words. There was no significant increase for the control words. (2) Two of the groups performed at a higher level than the third, apparently as an effect of age of the subjects. (3) In all the groups there was also a significant increase between the pretest and post-test 2. (4) There was not a decrease of performance from posttest 1 to posttest 2. The author, concluded, "To come back to our initial point, the present work strongly suggests that the lexicon developed by the deaf with Cued Speech has properties which are equivalent to the phonology of hearing subjects. In both cases the internal representations of the words are compatible with their orthographic representation. This allows the use of phonological coding to identify unfamiliar words and, as said before, can prime the whole process of reading acquisition."