MESHGuides

The system of Cued Speech has been adapted for at least 68 languages and dialects and more are being developed all the time.  This means that it is highly likely that families and professionals will be able to represent as many spoken languages as they wish for the deaf children in their lives.  There are as many ways to model more than one language for children as there are families doing so.  One tried and tested method is for someone to use different hands for the different languages eg cue English with the right hand and French with the left.  Deaf children receiving languages in this w

Educators 

If a child has a mild hearing loss CS may simply be used to support their understanding of individual phonemes for literacy learning or for things like word endings that they may be missing.   CS can also be used to help them to correct any pronunciation errors and to help them develop lip-reading skills.

If a child has any other degree of hearing loss including profound with no audition at all – CS can be used in all the ways given above and for complete access to spoken language through vision which perfectly complements any hearing they may also be able to use. 

Within a sign language using Deaf family, visual access may still be possible to both the sign language of the home and the spoken language of the country.  Often hearing family members such as grandparents, will cue for their deaf grandchildren but if the deaf parents themselves were raised with CS then they may also decide to use it expressively with their own children.

As the development of Cued Speech reached its 50th Anniversary, some deaf people who grew up with CS are using in it with their own children.

90-96% of deaf babies are born into hearing families, these families need and deserve a way to enable their deaf child to access the language of the home as soon as possible.

If a deaf child cannot hear all the sounds of speech, it does not make sense to communicate using the hearing route alone.  Signing can provide a means of communication but most hearing parents of deaf babies cannot use sign language which is of good quality – because they have not yet learnt it – and signing will never give direct access to complete spoken English.

It is estimated that, in Great Britain, one in ten children and young people aged 5-16 have a mental disorder that is associated with ‘considerable distress and substantial interference with personal functions’, such as family and social relationships, their capacity to cope with day to day stresses and life challenges and their learning.

Research has found that deaf children are four times more likely to experience mental health concerns.

Literacy

Hearing children acquire their understanding of language through listening to the speech of others – which is made up of sounds. 

Deaf children brought up with CS acquire their understanding of language through watching the cued speech of others – which is made up of the sound-based cues. 

Deaf children brought up with CS and hearing children can both bring the same skills to learning to read.

Lip-reading spoken English is notoriously difficult as we have identical lip-patterns for at least 8 pairs of phonemes and a further 6 phonemes have no discernable lip-pattern at all, this means that at best only about 33% of our spoken words are ‘lip-readable’.  Of course you can only lip-read a language you already have fluent understanding of – if you can’t think in the language you are trying to lip-read then you cannot match lip-patterns to an existing word bank in your memory.

Experiencing a cued language early in a child’s development will have long-lasting effects on the child’s ability to learn that language auditorily later, when they receive the cochlear implant.  For all children the first four years of life are vital for language acquisition, it may take many months for a clear diagnosis and approval for implant surgery and then there is a further wait before ‘switch on’.  Every day that a child goes without access to language in those early years will add to the overall language delay that then has to be addressed in the already intense rehabilitation pro

All children need to learn language when they are very young because their brains are most sensitive to language when they are babies and toddlers.

Researchers looking at the general population have found that some parents talked to their children very much more than others and that by the time the children were three years old children with chatty parents had vocabulary around twice that of the group which had less input.  This difference in language skills can be seen from infancy and the gap widens with age affecting their literacy and education.