Early experience of Cued Speech enhances speechreading performance in deaf

Abstract

It is known that deaf individuals usually outperform normal hearing subjects in speechreading; however, the underlying reasons remain unclear. In the present study, speechreading performance was assessed in normal hearing participants (NH), deaf participants who had been exposed to the Cued Speech (CS) system early and intensively, and deaf participants exposed to oral language without Cued Speech (NCS). Results show a gradation in performance with highest performance in CS, then in NCS, and finally NH participants. Moreover, error analysis suggests that speechreading processing is more accurate in the CS group than in the other groups. Given that early and intensive CS has been shown to promote development of accurate phonological processing, we propose that the higher speechreading results in Cued Speech users are linked to a better capacity in phonological decoding of visual articulators.

Effects of English Cued Speech on Speech Perception, Phonological Awareness and Literacy: A Case Study of a 9-Year-Old Deaf Boy Using a Cochlear Implant

“…no longer needed it as much to understand speech and acquire spoken and written language. Early exposure to French CS in early childhood can lead to an improvement in the ability to lipread French without CS (Aparicio et al, 2012) and this could have been the case for H.V. in the context of English CS.…”

“…Although some deaf children acquire a good level of lipreading skill without the aid of CS, it seems that early exposure to French CS can improve the ability to lipread French without CS (Aparicio et al, 2012). Aparicio et al (2012) compared the lipreading skills in three groups of adults: hearing participants, deaf participants who had been exposed to CS early and intensively, and deaf participants who had never been exposed to CS. Results demonstrated better performance in the CS group as compared with the non-CS group and the hearing group.…”

“…To investigate whether H.V. 's early exposure to CS had influenced his ability to perceive spoken English without CS, as shown with French-speaking adults in the study by Aparicio et al (2012), speech perception was assessed in an auditory-alone (AA) condition and in two audio-visual (AV) conditions, one without and one with English CS. Therefore, both AV tests used in the study allowed H.V.…”

Audiovisual spoken word training can promote or impede auditory-only perceptual learning: prelingually deafened adults with late-acquired cochlear implants versus normal hearing adults

“…Novel non-speech visual or vibrotactile stimuli that correlate with to-be-learned speech features might be useful for training, because they would not be available to the naïve perceiver as a substitute for speech information. Another type of concordant stimuli that is already used in training deaf children is cued speech (Cornett, 1967; Aparicio et al, 2012). Cued speech uses a small number of manual cues to disambiguate difficult visual speech stimuli and has been shown to be highly effective in establishing normal phonological representations.…”

“…A cochlear implant for pre-/perilingually deafened adults could be useful in acquiring new vocabulary, as these individuals tend to lag behind normal-hearing adults in terms of reading ability and vocabulary (Aparicio et al, 2012). The results here suggest that AV training could be very effective for learning new words and their semantic relationships, which is itself a valid goal for enhancing speech understanding.…”