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Recent studies suggest that benefiting early from both a cochlear implant (CI) and exposure to cued speech (CS, support system for the perception of oral language) positively impacts deaf children's speech perception, speech intelligibility, and reading. This study aims to show how: 1/CS-based speech perception ("cue reading"), and speech intelligibility might also constitute precise measures for determining the impact of CI and CS on deaf students' literary performance; 2/print exposure might also be a predictive factor in this equation. We conducted regression analyses to examine the impact of these three variables in two experiments conducted on Grade 2-3 deaf children and Grade 6-9 deaf adolescents. Results indicate print exposure significantly contributes to literacy skills across experiments, with additional contributions from cue reading and speech intelligibility in older students. The predictive aspect of the print exposure, cue reading, and speech intelligibility variables will be discussed, as will the consequences for educational and pedagogical practices.

Purpose: One of the strategies that can be used to support speech communication in deaf children is cued speech, a visual code in which manual gestures are used as additional phonological information to supplement the acoustic and labial speech information. Cued speech has been shown to improve speech perception and phonological skills. This exploratory study aims to assess whether and how cued speech reading proficiency may also have a beneficial effect on the acoustic and articulatory correlates of consonant production in children. Method: Eight children with cochlear implants (from 5 to 11 years of age) and with different receptive proficiency in Canadian French Cued Speech (three children with low receptive proficiency vs. five children with high receptive proficiency) are compared to 10 children with typical hearing (from 4 to 11 years of age) on their production of stop and fricative consonants. Articulation was assessed with ultrasound measurements. Results: The preliminary results reveal that cued speech proficiency seems to sustain the development of speech production in children with cochlear implants and to improve their articulatory gestures, particularly for the place contrast in stops as well as fricatives. Conclusion: This work highlights the importance of studying objective data and comparing acoustic and articulatory measurements to better characterize speech production in children.

This article explores the available research literature on language development and language interventions among deaf and hard of hearing (d/hh) children. This literature is divided into two broad categories: Research on natural languages (specifically American Sign Language and spoken English) and research on communication systems (specifically iterations of signed English and cued speech). These bodies of literature are summarized, with special attention paid to intervention research and research exploring the impacts of language skills on literacy development. Findings indicate that there is generally a stronger research base on natural languages as compared to communication systems, though more studies in both categories are necessary. Additionally, there are very few intervention studies and even fewer that aim to intervene upon language with the explicit goal of impacting literacy; therefore, there is little known about whether and how interventions that aim to support language development may have direct or indirect impacts on literacy within this population. Further research on this topic, as well as replication studies and research with larger sample sizes, is strongly recommended.

Cued Speech is a system that manually codes the phonemic patterns of spoken languages for visual accessibility. Since its inception, this system has transitioned from a support for speech reading to the current use of home language and literacy development. While controversial in some sectors within the field of Deaf education and the Deaf Community, cueing provides families with a method to visually supplement home languages through two approaches: partnering with a spoken language or a bilingual-bimodal approach.

Cued Speech is a visual mode of communication in which mouth movements of speech combine with "cues" to make the sounds (phonemes) of traditional spoken languages look different. Cueing allows users who are deaf, hard of hearing, or who have language/communication disorders, to access the basic, fundamental properties of spoken languages through the use of vision. Using Cued Speech in addition to American Sign Language (ASL) or other communication philosophies, such as Sign Supported Speech or Simultaneous Communication, can be beneficial in a multitude of ways. Chicago's Alexander Graham Bell Montessori School offer a full-inclusion program providing a Montessori curriculum with both individualized and small-group instruction that allows students unlimited opportunities for interaction with same-age peers who are deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing. Cued Speech is used throughout the school with all the students, and ASL is used as a supplement. Each teacher receives formal instruction in Cued Speech and uses cues with the students. The Illinois School for the Deaf (ISD) incorporates Cued Speech into its bilingual program, with Cued Speech used, but with wide variance, in classrooms and subject areas throughout ISD's pre-kindergarten through post-high school instruction.

The mention of Cued Speech (CS) within the field of deaf education and deaf studies is sure to spark some strong opinions. In this systematic review of the literature, the existing evidence related to the use of CS is examined thematically. While several studies indicate differences between modalities, the purpose of this paper is not to refute any modality, but to give an historical understanding of the research related to CS. In addition, the authors provide a chronicle of the themes related to CS since its inception in the 1960s, illustrating a shift in use over time. Discussion and implications for future research is provided.

Purpose: Weighting of acoustic cues for perceiving placeof-articulation speech contrasts was measured to determine the separate and interactive effects of age and use of cochlear implants (CIs). It has been found that adults with normal hearing (NH) show reliance on fine-grained spectral information (e.g., formants), whereas adults with CIs show reliance on broad spectral shape (e.g., spectral tilt). In question was whether children with NH and CIs would demonstrate the same patterns as adults, or show differences based on ongoing maturation of hearing and phonetic skills. Method: Children and adults with NH and with CIs categorized a /b/-/d/ speech contrast based on two orthogonal spectral cues. Among CI users, phonetic cue weights were compared to vowel identification scores and Spectral-Temporally Modulated Ripple Test thresholds. Results: NH children and adults both relied relatively more on the fine-grained formant cue and less on the broad spectral tilt cue compared to participants with CIs. However, early-implanted children with CIs better utilized the formant cue compared to adult CI users. Formant cue weights correlated with CI participants' vowel recognition and in children, also related to Spectral-Temporally Modulated Ripple Test thresholds. Adults and child CI users with very poor phonetic perception showed additive use of the two cues, whereas those with better and/or more mature cue usage showed a prioritized trading relationship, akin to NH listeners. Conclusions: Age group and hearing modality can influence phonetic cue-weighting patterns. Results suggest that simple nonlexical categorization tests correlate with more general speech recognition skills of children and adults with CIs.

This paper, the fourth in a series concerned with the level of access afforded to students who use educational interpreters, focuses on the intelligibility of interpreters who use Signing Exact English (SEE). Eight expert receivers of SEE were employed to evaluate the intelligibility of transliterated messages that varied in accuracy and lag time. Results of intelligibility tests showed that, similar to Cued Speech transliterators, (a) accuracy had a large positive effect on transliterator intelligibility, (b) overall intelligibility (69%) was higher than average accuracy (58%), and (c) the likelihood that an utterance reached 70% intelligibility was somewhat sigmoidal in shape, with the likelihood of reaching 70% intelligibility dropping off fastest for accuracy values <65%. Accuracy alone accounted for 53% of the variance in transliterator intelligibility; mouthing was identified as a secondary factor that explained an additional 11%. Although lag time accounted for just .4% of the remaining variance, utterances produced with lag times between 0.6 and 1.2 s were most likely to exceed 70% intelligibility. With 36% of the variance still unexplained, other sources of transliterator variability (for example, facial expression, nonmanual markers, and mouth/sign synchronization) may also play a role in intelligibility and should be explored in future research.

This paper is the third in a series concerned with the level of access provided to deaf and hard of hearing children who rely on interpreters to access classroom communication. The first two papers focused on the accuracy and intelligibility of educational interpreters who use Cued Speech (CS); this study examines the accuracy of those who use Signing Exact English (SEE). Accuracy, or the proportion of the message correctly produced by the interpreter, was evaluated in 12 SEE transliterators with varying degrees of experience at three different speaking rates (slow, normal, and fast). Results were similar to those previously reported for CS transliterators: (a) speaking rate had a large negative effect on accuracy, primarily due to increased frequency of omissions, (b) the effect of lag time on accuracy was also negative, but relatively small, accounting for just 8% of the variance, and (c) highly experienced transliterators were somewhat more accurate than transliterators with minimal experience, although experience alone did not guarantee accuracy. Lastly, like their CS counterparts, the overall accuracy of the 12 SEE transliterators, 42% on average, was low enough to raise serious concerns about the quality of transliteration services that (at least some) children receive in educational settings.

Speech perception in noise remains challenging for Deaf/Hard of Hearing people (D/HH), even fitted with hearing aids or cochlear implants. The perception of sentences in noise by 20 implanted or aided D/HH subjects mastering Cued Speech (CS), a system of hand gestures complementing lip movements, was compared with the perception of 15 typically hearing (TH) controls in three conditions: audio only, audiovisual, and audiovisual + CS. Similar audiovisual scores were obtained for signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) 11 dB higher in D/HH participants compared with TH ones. Adding CS information enabled D/HH participants to reach a mean score of 83% in the audiovisual + CS condition at a mean SNR of 0 dB, similar to the usual audio score for TH participants at this SNR. This confirms that the combination of lipreading and Cued Speech system remains extremely important for persons with hearing loss, particularly in adverse hearing conditions.

The aim of this paper is to analyse oral communication strategies in English as a foreign language (EFL) of deaf and hard of hard-of-hearing (D/HH) students. The paper is based on an action research case study concerning oral communication strategies of this group of students with special educational needs. The results demonstrate that when they communicate orally in the target foreign language, D/HH students use the same verbal, nonverbal, linguistic, and non-linguistic stimuli as their hearing peers, alongside certain characteristic communication strategies. The paper relates these students' employment of various communication strategies to their greater autonomy, and emphasises the need to identify and promote beneficial communication strategies during EFL classes for the D/HH.

Every day, teachers face the time-consuming task of adapting materials from curricula that do not meet their students' needs or match their learning styles. This article discusses ready-made literacy units specifically designed for teachers of deaf and hard of hearing students. The units were part of the Cornerstones Project, an activity of the WGBH National Center for Accessible Media. (The units were developed with funding from Steppingstones of Technology Innovation for Students With Disabilities, a program of the U.S. Department of Education.) The Cornerstones Project built the literacy units around three animated stories--"The Fox and the Crow"; "Click, Clack, Moo"; and "Joseph Had a Little Overcoat"--originally featured on "Between the Lions", a long-running children's TV program co-produced by Boston PBS affiliate WGBH, Sirius Thinking, Ltd., and Mississippi Public Broadcasting. Each unit is two weeks long, and immerses students in the language and ideas of one story. Students can download online video clips of each story (in Windows or Mac) in whichever communication mode they prefer--ASL, Cued Speech, or Signing Exact English (SEE). Free downloads are available at the Cornerstones website, http://pbskids.org/lions/cornerstones.

Six students and six parents were interviewed about the use of Cued Speech (CS) in an inclusive context in Quebec, Canada. The objective of the study was to describe their perceptions of the use of the French version of Cued Speech in high school and to identify factors that could influence these perceptions. The results of the semi-structured interviews showed that CS use is often temporary but that it is helpful for developing oral and written language. It also supports inclusion, so long as certain conditions for its application are met with respect to interpreter services and interactions at school. In some circumstances, the participants found Quebec Sign Language useful to complement Cued Speech.

This paper is the second in a series concerned with the level of access afforded to students who use educational interpreters. The first paper (Krause & Tessler, 2016) focused on factors affecting accuracy of messages produced by Cued Speech (CS) transliterators (expression). In this study, factors affecting intelligibility (reception by deaf consumers) of those messages is explored. Results for eight highly skilled receivers of CS showed that (a) overall intelligibility (72%) was higher than average accuracy (61%), (b) accuracy had a large positive effect on intelligibility, accounting for 26% of the variance, and (c) the likelihood that an utterance reached 70% intelligibility as a function of accuracy was sigmoidal, decreasing sharply for accuracy values below 65%. While no direct effect of lag time on intelligibility could be detected, intelligibility was most likely to exceed 70% for utterances produced with lag times between 0.6 and 1.8 s. Differences between CS transliterators suggested sources of transliterator variability (e.g. speechreadability, facial expression, non-manual markers, cueing rate) that are also likely to affect intelligibility and thus warrant further investigation. Such research, along with investigations of other communication options (e.g. American Sign Language, signed English systems, etc.) are important for ensuring accessibility to all students who use educational interpreters.

Even though Cued Speech has been a communication option for 50 years, it has not been widely adopted among users of English or in the country where it was created (i.e., the United States). This situation has led scholars and practitioners in the field of deafness to question whether the original intent of creating this system has been realized and if there is an adequate research base to support the use of Cued Speech in developing English reading abilities. The purpose of this review was to examine the available research to determine whether there is evidence available to address the persistent questions about Cued Speech and English. Information from four areas of literature was reviewed and summarized, with converging findings from the available data sources revealing support for the role Cued Speech plays in developing reading abilities in English. Limitations of the current literature base and directions for future research are explored.

When identifying phonemes in new spoken words, lipreading is an important source of information for many deaf people. Because many groups of phonemes are virtually indistinguishable by sight, deaf people are able to identify about 30% of phonemes when lipreading non-words. Cued speech (CS) is a system of hand shapes and hand positions used alongside speech to disambiguate similarities in lip patterns. Deaf children exposed to CS from under 3 years of age go on to develop age-appropriate language and literacy skills. However, there are no studies evaluating the explicit training of CS with older deaf children. This study is the first part of a long-term project to develop and evaluate a computer-delivered programme to teach school-aged deaf children to recognize cued phonemes. Sixty-two adult hearing participants were allocated to a single training session in one of three training conditions: cued speech training (CST), lipreading training and auditory training in noise. They were all tested on their ability to identify 13 phonemes in non-words when denied access to sound. The CST group made highly significant improvements in identifying cued phonemes and these changes could not be explained by lipreading practice or familiarization with a closed set of phonemes. Improvements generalized to non-words that were not used in training. This suggests that explicit training in CS could help deaf children to identify cued phonemes in new words. Practical implications of introducing the teaching of CS to selected deaf children are discussed.

Many deaf and hard-of-hearing children rely on interpreters to access classroom communication. Although the exact level of access provided by interpreters in these settings is unknown, it is likely to depend heavily on interpreter accuracy (portion of message correctly produced by the interpreter) and the factors that govern interpreter accuracy. In this study, the accuracy of 12 Cued Speech (CS) transliterators with varying degrees of experience was examined at three different speaking rates (slow, normal, fast). Accuracy was measured with a high-resolution, objective metric in order to facilitate quantitative analyses of the effect of each factor on accuracy. Results showed that speaking rate had a large negative effect on accuracy, caused primarily by an increase in omitted cues, whereas the effect of lag time on accuracy, also negative, was quite small and explained just 3% of the variance. Increased experience level was generally associated with increased accuracy; however, high levels of experience did not guarantee high levels of accuracy. Finally, the overall accuracy of the 12 transliterators, 54% on average across all three factors, was low enough to raise serious concerns about the quality of CS transliteration services that (at least some) children receive in educational settings.

The authors conducted an integrative review of the research literature on the writing development, writing instruction, and writing assessment of young deaf children ages 3 to 8 years (or preschool through third grade) published between 1990 and 2012. A total of 17 studies were identified that met inclusion criteria. The analysis examined research problems, theoretical frames, research methodologies, and major findings across the body of work. Findings of the review indicated that much of the research has focused on spelling, and when studies examined writing development, the analyses were limited to the word level. Assessment of writing has been largely ignored. Results also indicated that two primary conceptual frameworks have dominated the field across the 22-year span, with divergent implications for pedagogy and practice. The researchers call for longitudinal studies that examine deaf children's use of English grammar and syntax within connected discourse.

Infants' language exposure largely involves face-to-face interactions providing acoustic and visual speech cues but also social cues that might foster language learning. Yet, both audiovisual speech information and social information have so far received little attention in research on infants' early language development. Using a preferential looking paradigm, 44 German 6-month olds' ability to detect mismatches between concurrently presented auditory and visual native vowels was tested. Outcomes were related to mothers' speech style and interactive behavior assessed during free play with their infant, and to infant-specific factors assessed through a questionnaire. Results show that mothers' and infants' social behavior modulated infants' preference for matching audiovisual speech. Moreover, infants' audiovisual speech perception correlated with later vocabulary size, suggesting a lasting effect on language development.

Many studies have shown that French Cued Speech (CS) can enhance lipreading and the development of phonological awareness and literacy in deaf children but, as yet, there is little evidence that these findings can be generalized to English CS. This study investigated the possible effects of English CS on the speech perception, phonological awareness, and literacy skills of a 9-year-old boy, H.V., who had been exposed to English CS from the age of 1 year and been fitted with a right-sided cochlear implant at 2:03 years. Scores in subtests of standardized assessments for phonological processing, reading, and spelling were in per centile ranks from 50 to 98. Speech perception was assessed in three conditions: auditory alone, audio-visual without CS (AV) and AV with CS (+CS). To hypothesize on the effects of CS on H.V.'s ability to identify English phonemes in novel words he was asked to perceive and write non-words with predictable spellings (e.g. drump) dictated live in the two AV conditions (without and with CS). There was a significant difference between his performance in the two conditions for this dictation test where he scored 100 per cent in the +CS condition and 50 per cent in the AV condition. This suggests CS was helping H.V. to perceive and store novel words and that this effect could have contributed to his development of vocabulary, phonological awareness, and literacy skills that were generally in advance of those expected for his age.

Background: Only a small number of longitudinal studies have been conducted to assess the literacy skills of children with hearing impairment. The results of these studies are inconsistent with regard to the importance of phonology in reading acquisition as is the case in studies with hearing children. Colin, Magnan, Ecalle, and Leybaert (2007) revealed the important role of early phonological skills and the contribution of the factor of age of exposure to Cued Speech (CS: a manual system intended to resolve the ambiguities inherent to speechreading) to subsequent reading acquisition (from kindergarten to first grade) in children with deafness. The aim of the present paper is twofold: (1) to confirm the role of early exposure to CS in the development of the linguistic skills necessary in order to learn reading and writing in second grade; (2) to reveal the possible existence of common factors other than CS that may influence literacy performances and explain the inter-individual difference within groups of children with hearing impairment. Method: Eighteen 6-year-old hearing-impaired and 18 hearing children of the same chronological age were tested from kindergarten to second grade. The children with deafness had either been exposed to CS at an early age, at home and before kindergarten (early-CS group), or had first been exposed to it when they entered kindergarten (late-CS group) or first grade (beginner-CS group). Children were given implicit and explicit phonological tasks, silent reading tasks (word recognition and sentence comprehension), word spelling, and vocabulary tasks. Results: Children in the early-CS group outperformed those of the late-CS and beginner-CS groups in phonological tasks from first grade to second grade. They became better readers and better spellers than those from the late-CS group and the beginner-CS group. Their performances did not differ from those of hearing children in any of the tasks except for the receptive vocabulary test. Thus early exposure to CS seems to permit the development of linguistic skills necessary in order to learn reading and writing. The possible contribution of other factors to the acquisition of literacy skills by children with hearing impairment will be discussed. (Contains 9 figures and 5 tables.)

Text cues facilitate the perception of spoken sentences to which they are semantically related (Zekveld, Rudner, et al., 2011). In this study, semantically related and unrelated cues preceding sentences evoked more activation in middle temporal gyrus (MTG) and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) than nonword cues, regardless of acoustic quality (speech in noise or speech in quiet). Larger verbal working memory (WM) capacity (reading span) was associated with greater intelligibility benefit obtained from related cues, with less speech-related activation in the left superior temporal gyrus and left anterior IFG, and with more activation in right medial frontal cortex for related versus unrelated cues. Better ability to comprehend masked text was associated with greater ability to disregard unrelated cues, and with more activation in left angular gyrus (AG). We conclude that individual differences in cognitive abilities are related to activation in a speech-sensitive network including left MTG, IFG and AG during cued speech perception. (Contains 5 figures and 4 tables.)

Binaural hearing in cochlear implant (CI) users can be achieved either by bilateral implantation or bimodally with a contralateral hearing aid (HA). Binaural-bimodal hearing has the advantage of complementing the high-frequency electric information from the CI by low-frequency acoustic information from the HA. We examined the contribution of a contralateral HA in 25 adult implantees to their perception of fundamental frequency-cued speech characteristics (initial consonant voicing, intonation, and emotions). Testing with CI alone, HA alone, and bimodal hearing showed that all three characteristics were best perceived under the bimodal condition. Significant differences were recorded between bimodal and HA conditions in the initial voicing test, between bimodal and CI conditions in the intonation test, and between both bimodal and CI conditions and between bimodal and HA conditions in the emotion-in-speech test. These findings confirmed that such binaural-bimodal hearing enhances perception of these speech characteristics and suggest that implantees with residual hearing in the contralateral ear may benefit from a HA in that ear.

We assessed the reading and reading-related skills (phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory) of deaf children fitted with cochlear implants (CI), either exposed to cued speech early (before 2 years old) (CS+) or never (CS-). Their performance was compared to that of 2 hearing control groups, 1 matched for reading level (RL), and 1 matched for chronological age (CA). Phonemic awareness and phonological short-term memory were assessed respectively through a phonemic similarity judgment task and through a word span task measuring phonological similarity effects. To assess the use of sublexical and lexical reading procedures, children read pseudowords and irregular words aloud. Results showed that cued speech improved performance on both the phonemic awareness and the reading tasks but not on the phonological short-term memory task. In phonemic awareness and reading, CS+ children obtained accuracy and rapidity scores similar to CA controls, whereas CS- children obtained lower scores than hearing controls. Nevertheless, in phonological short-term memory task, the phonological similarity effect of both CI groups was similar. Overall, these results support the use of cued speech to improve phonemic awareness and reading skills in CI children.

This paper describes early language development in a deaf Spanish child fitted with a cochlear implant (CI) when she was 1 year 6 months old. The girl had been exposed to Cued Speech (CS) since that age. The main aim of the research was to identify potential areas of slow language development as well as the potential benefit of CI and CS. At the beginning of this research the child was 2 years 6 months old (she had been using the CI for 12 months). Adult-child 30-minute sessions were videotaped every week for 1 year (13-24 months of CI use), and transcribed according to CHAT norms. Measures of phonemic inventory, intelligibility, lexicon, and grammar development were obtained. Part of the data were compared with data from two normally hearing (NH) children with the same mean length of utterance (MLU). In order to confirm trends observed during these 12 months of observation, an extra set of data was obtained in the next 3 months (25-27 months of CI use). Results in the initial 12 month period (13-24 months of CI use) showed irregular language development in the deaf child. The development of her phonemic inventory and lexicon progressed at a rate that was similar to, or faster than, that of NH children. However, the slow acquisition of articles and also the slow development of MLU suggested that the child might have problems with grammar. Data from the next 3 months (25-27 months of CI use) confirmed this trend. Results are discussed in relation to similar studies in other languages. Potential benefits of CS are also discussed. (Contains 5 figures and 6 tables.)

Cued American English (CAE) is a visual variety of English derived from a mode of communication called Cued Speech (CS). CS, or cueing, is a system of communication for use with the deaf, which consists of hand shapes, hand placements, and mouth shapes that signify the phonemic information conventionally conveyed through speech in spoken languages. In small language communities in the United States, native deaf users of CAE and those who communicate with them have facilitated the development of a natural variety of English that is specific to the mode of cueing. This paper defines CAE as a variety of English, including its features, functional spectrum, social acquisition, code switching protocols, and intersection with English as a Second Language in the American Deaf community. The author discusses grammatical accommodations and visual prosodic features, reviews relevant research, and describes the CS system in detail as a means by which cueing maps to and facilitates natural language.

The Educational Interpreter Performance Assessment (EIPA) is as an important research tool for examining the quality of interpreters who use American Sign Language or a sign system in classroom settings, but it is not currently applicable to educational interpreters who use Cued Speech (CS). In order to determine the feasibility of extending the EIPA to include CS, a pilot EIPA test was developed and administered to 24 educational CS interpreters. Fifteen of the interpreters' performances were evaluated two to three times in order to assess reliability. Results show that the instrument has good construct validity and test-retest reliability. Although more interrater reliability data are needed, intrarater reliability was quite high (0.9), suggesting that the pilot test can be rated as reliably as signing versions of the EIPA. Notably, only 48% of interpreters who formally participated in pilot testing performed at a level that could be considered minimally acceptable. In light of similar performance levels previously reported for interpreters who sign (e.g., Schick, Williams, & Kupermintz, 2006), these results suggest that interpreting services for deaf and hard-of hearing students, regardless of the communication option used, are often inadequate and could seriously hinder access to the classroom environment.

The aim of this study was to explore the ability of children who are profoundly deaf to reach high levels of reading proficiency on an inferential reading task. In an experimental narrative reading task, four children with prelingual hearing loss who used cued speech (MOC group) were compared with 58 students with typical hearing: 30 peers at the same chronologic age and 28 students at the same reading level. The MOC group performed similarly to the reading level group. Cued speech, used jointly with a cochlear implant, seems to provide students who are deaf or hard of hearing with an additional support that helps them achieve high performance levels in reading comprehension.

The article challenges educators to rethink reading instruction practices for students who are deaf or hard of hearing. The authors begin with a discussion of the role of phonology in reading, then summarize the evidence of phonological coding among skilled deaf readers and investigate alternative routes for acquiring phonologically related skills such as the use of speechreading, articulatory feedback, Visual Phonics, and Cued Speech. Finally, they present recent intervention studies and proposed procedures to employ phonics-based instruction with students who are deaf or hard of hearing. The authors conclude with the assertion that the teaching of phonologically related skills by means of instructional tools such as Visual Phonics and Cued Speech can and should be incorporated into reading instruction for students who are deaf or hard of hearing. The authors recommend additional research in this important area.

Background: The aim of the present study was twofold: 1) to determine whether phonological skills measured in deaf prereaders predict their later phonological and reading skills after one year of reading instruction as is the case for hearing children; 2) to examine whether the age of exposure to a fully specified phonological input such as Cued Speech may explain the inter-individual differences observed in deaf children's phonological and word recognition levels. Method: Twenty-one 6-year-old deaf prereaders and 21 hearing children of the same chronological age performed two phonological tasks (rhyme decision and generation tasks); they were re-assessed 12 months later and presented with other phonological tasks (rhyme decision and common unit identification tasks) and a written word choice test. Results: Phonological skills measured before learning to read predicted the written word recognition score the following year, both for hearing and for deaf participants. Age of onset of exposure to Cued Speech was also a strong predictor of phonological and written word recognition scores in beginning deaf readers. Conclusions: The evidence broadly supports the idea of a capacity for acquiring phonological skills in deaf children. Deaf children who are able to develop an implicitly structured phonological knowledge before learning to read will be better readers when this knowledge becomes explicit under the pressure of reading instruction.

This study aimed to (a) investigate the effect of using a hearing aid in conjunction with a cochlear implant in opposite ears on speech perception in quiet and in noise, (b) identify the speech information obtained from a hearing aid that is additive to the information obtained from a cochlear implant, and (c) explore the relationship between aided thresholds in the nonimplanted ear and speech perception benefit from wearing a hearing aid in conjunction with a cochlear implant in opposite ears. Fourteen adults who used the Nucleus 24 cochlear implant system in 1 ear participated in the study. All participants had either used a hearing aid in the nonimplanted ear for at least 75% of waking hours after cochlear implantation, and/or, hearing loss less than 90 dB HL in the low frequencies in the nonimplanted ear. Speech perception was evaluated in 3 conditions: cochlear implant alone (CI), hearing aid alone (HA), and cochlear implant in conjunction with hearing aid in opposite ears (CIHA). Three speech perception tests were used: consonant-vowel nucleus-consonant (CNC) words in quiet, City University of New York style (CUNY) sentences in coincident signal and noise, and spondees in coincidental and spatially separated signal and noise. Information transmission analyses were performed on the CNC responses. Of the 14 participants tested, 6 showed significant bimodal benefit on open-set speech perception measures and 5 showed benefit on close-set spondees. However, 2 participants showed poorer speech perception with CIHA than CI in at least 1 of the speech perception tests. Results of information transmission analyses showed that bimodal benefit (performance with CIHA minus that with CI) in quiet arises from improved perception of the low frequency components in speech. Results showed that participants with poorer aided thresholds in the mid-to-high frequencies demonstrated greater bimodal benefit. It is possible that the mid-to-high frequency information provided by tearing aids may be conflicting with the cochlear implants. (Contains 3 tables and 8 figures.)

This paper studies the linguistic input attended by a deaf child exposed to cued speech (CS) in the final part of her prelinguistic period (18-24 months). Subjects are the child, her mother, and her therapist. Analyses have provided data about the quantity of input directed to the child (oral input, more than 1,000 words per half-an-hour session; cued ratio, more than 60% of oral input; and attended ratio, more than 55% of oral input), its linguistic quality (lexical variety, grammatical complexity, etc.), and other properties of interaction (child attention and use of spontaneous gestures). Results show that both adults provided a rich linguistic input to the child and that the child attended most of the input that the adults cued. These results might explain the positive linguistic development of children exposed early to CS.

Deaf children exposed to Cued Speech (CS), either before age two (early) or later at school (late), were presented with pseudowords with and without CS. The main goal was to establish the way in which lipreading and CS combine to produce unitary percepts, similar to audiovisual integration in speech perception, when participants are presented with synchronized but different lipreading and auditory information (the McGurk paradigm). In the present experiment, lips and cues were sometimes congruent and sometimes incongruent. It was expected that incongruent cues would force the perceptual system to adopt solutions according to the weight attributed to different sources of phonological information. With congruent cues, performance improved, with improvements greater in the early than the late group. With incongruent cues, performance decreased relative to lipreading only, indicating that cues were not ignored, and it was observed that the effect of incongruent cues increased when the visibility of the target phoneme decreased. The results are compatible with the notion that the perceptual system integrates cues and lipreading according to principles similar to those evoked to explain audiovisual integration.

The difficulties encountered by students with hearing loss and special learning needs are often attributed exclusively to hearing loss, particularly when there are no other obvious physical or sensory handicaps. A Louisiana public school system has addressed this issue for the past 9 years and has included both regular and special education instructors in the children's programming. As a team, individualized goals and accommodations are designed similar to those of their peers with normal hearing with similar learning needs. The programming includes Cued Speech; intensive speech, language, and listening training; use of assistive listening devices; early intervention for the development of reading, writing, and general knowledge; annual assessment; identification of specific learning styles; and mainstreaming. As a result, the students with hearing loss who have special learning needs were able to achieve passing scores on the state's "high stakes" testing.

The aim of the present study was to advance the knowledge of the linguistic development of students with prelingual profound deafness, especially the acquisition and use of prepositions in Spanish, a lexical category with an important role in verbal comprehension. The researchers sought to learn the level of mastery students with prelingual profound deafness can achieve in the command of prepositions, depending on the system of communication they have been exposed to: classic oralism, Cued Speech, or signed language. The results show that the different systems of communication contribute, to different degrees, to the acquisition of Spanish prepositions, with the best results being obtained with Cued Speech. (Contains 3 tables, 3 figures, and 1 note.)

This chart provides detailed information on the programs and services provided by U.S. schools for preschool, elementary, and secondary children who are deaf or hard of hearing. Schools are listed by state and information is provided on enrollment, age range, educational services, and communication options. (CR)

A study compared the rhyme-generation ability of 20 college students with severe to profound deafness from cued speech (CS) and non-cued speech (NCS) backgrounds with 10 controls for consistent orthography-to-phonology (O-P) rhyming elements and inconsistent O-P. Participants from CS backgrounds did not differ significantly from the hearing controls. (Contains references.) (Author/CR)

Two experiments, one with congenitally deaf and one with hearing individuals, investigated memory for serial order via Cued Speech (CS). Deaf individuals, but not hearing individuals experienced with CS, appeared to use the phonology of CS to support their recall. The recency effect was greater for hearing individuals provided with sound than for deaf participants. (Contains references.) (Author/DB)

Compared spelling performance of hearing and deaf 6- to 14- year-olds on high- and low-frequency words. Found that most spelling productions of hearing children and deaf children with early intensive home cued speech (CS) exposure were phonologically accurate for both types of words. Deaf children with later CS exposure at school had lower proportion of phonologically accurate spellings than others. (Author/KB)