Cued Speech - History

History

Cued Speech was invented in 1966 by Dr. R. Orin Cornett at Gallaudet College, Washington D.C. After discovering that children with prelingual and profound hearing impairments typically have poor reading comprehension, he developed the system with the aim of improving the reading abilities of such children through better comprehension of the phonemes of English. As many sounds look identical on the lips (such as /p/ and /b/), the hand signals introduce a visual contrast in place of the formerly acoustic contrast. Cued Speech may also help people hearing incomplete or distorted sound — according to the National Cued Speech Association at cuedspeech.org, "cochlear implants and Cued Speech are powerful partners".

Since Cued Speech is based on making sounds visible to the hearing impaired, Cued Speech is not limited to use in English speaking nations. Because of the demand for use in other languages/countries, by 1994 Dr. Cornett had adapted cueing to 25 other languages and dialects. Originally designed to represent American English, the system was adapted to French in 1977. As of 2005, Cued Speech has been adapted to approximately 60 languages and dialects, including six dialects of English. For tonal languages such as Thai, the tone is indicated by inclination and movement of the hand. For English, Cued speech uses eight different hand shapes and four different positions around the mouth.