Visual Speech in the Head: The Effect of Cued-Speech on Rhyming, Remembering, and Spelling

Abstract

Deaf children rely mainly on lipreading to understand spoken language. The phonological representations they develop from the lipread signal are underspecified, leading to poor performances in all mental activities relying on such representations. To overcome these difficulties, systems have been designed that deliver entirely visually specified information about the phonological contrasts of spoken language. The paper explores the consequences of exposure to one of such systems, namely cued-speech (CS) on the development of phonological representations. Deaf children exposed early to CS at home show a reliance on inner speech for rhyming, remembering, and spelling similar to that displayed by hearing children but different from that of deaf children not exposed early to CS. We argue that the degree of specificity of phonological information delivered to the deaf children is more important than the modality though which they perceive speech for the development of phonological abilities.