Benefits of Cued Speech
The many benefits of Cued Speech follow on from the simple fact that, with its use, deaf people can see all the sound-based units of speech as clearly as hearing people hear them.
Research shows that deaf children brought up with Cued Speech can:
- achieve literacy levels equivalent to hearing children of the same age
- think in the spoken language of hearing society
- make better use of their residual hearing
- make better use of their cochlear implant.
Cued Speech can also:
- be used by hearing parents to give their deaf baby or child complete and early access to their home language and culture – parents do not need to learn a new language in order to communicate
- give children quick, easy and direct access to English, clarifying any spoken word
- be clearly understood by young deaf babies
- be used alongside British Sign Language for true bilingualism
- help deaf children’s speech and some speech and language problems in hearing children
- be used by a Cued Speech Transliterator, to make the speech of a third person fully accessible
- help adult Deaf people to improve their English skills
- allow both born-deaf, deafened and hearing people to communicate using the English language.
Clear, accessible language
Hearing parents will find that when they use Cued Speech with their young child the most obvious benefit, and one which will become immediately apparent, is that they can express their whole language as soon as they have learnt to cue. Your deaf child will not immediately understand it, of course, any more than a hearing baby would. But Cued Speech gives hearing parents the tool to express their own language in a way that is TOTALLY clear to their deaf baby. Soon your deaf baby will make the association between the cues (with the addition of any sounds that he or she can hear through hearing aids) and names, objects, and ideas just as a hearing baby would. Language development can take place in roughly the same way and at the same pace as it would if he or she were hearing. Once spoken language is made fully accessible by the addition of the cues, deaf children can begin to think using that same spoken language – but accessed visually. They are developing inner language.
Inner Language
Inner or internal language is enormously important. Uniquely Cued Speech children (children who have had consistent access to Cued Speech) can think in ’spoken’ language even if they have not heard it.
Dr Cornett, devisor of Cued Speech, wrote in 2000:
‘An important and remarkable fact is that children who have grown up with Cued Speech think in the spoken language. In 1978 I wrote to 15 teenagers who had grown up with Cued Speech, asking them to tell me what happens in their minds when they think. Thirteen replied to my letter. With regard to what happens in their minds when they think, aside from visualizing what they are thinking about, eleven wrote the identical words: “I hear myself talking”. One, who has never had any evidence of any hearing wrote: “I feel myself talking”. All were reported by their parents to talk in their sleep.’
It is this internalised language which allows deaf children who have been brought up with Cued Speech to develop normal reading skills and to improve their lipreading skills and speech. The ability to acquire full, complete, internalised spoken language without delay is the base on which these other benefits depend.