Cued Speech Conference Draws International Attention

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For the first time in a decade, top international researchers as well as participants from around the United States, will attend Cued Speech: Celebrating Language, Literacy, and Excellence – a major national conference that celebrates the enormous progress in the education of deaf/hard of hearing students since Cued Speech was invented 40 years ago. The conference celebrates unprecedented literacy rates among deaf children. Hurry! Registration ends July 10. Go to www.cuedspeech.org for more information and to register.
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Read more at: http://www.emediawire.com/releases/2006/7/emw408499.htm
 
If there has been such progress in literacy, then how come reading levels are still pretty low? Is the progress directly attribuated to Cuem, or maybe due to the possibilty that the kids getting it may be the products of hyperinvolved parents.
 
deafdyke said:
If there has been such progress in literacy, then how come reading levels are still pretty low? Is the progress directly attribuated to Cuem, or maybe due to the possibilty that the kids getting it may be the products of hyperinvolved parents.
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Did you actually read the article via that link in first post.. although kokonut pointed it out clearly via that link in my 2nd post.
 
If there has been such progress in literacy, then how come reading levels are still pretty low? Is the progress directly attribuated to Cuem, or maybe due to the possibilty that the kids getting it may be the products of hyperinvolved parents.
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You sure asked GOOD questions.

My answers would be... cuem remains an unknown tool for the majority of deaf population and when they do hear about it, misunderstood what it was about so they never really applied it for their education.

Is it possible that deaf cuers succeeded because of their hyperinvolved parents? Well, parental involvement is crucial to helping a child develop language but there was a study done in Belgium that even if parents were not hyperinvolved or using cued speech and their kids were using it only at school, they performed significantly better than signers and oralists but they did not do as well as the ones that have cueing parents. Clearly that shows that parental involvement is very crucial. My personal experience reflects that conclusion as well.

Please note that not *all* deaf cuers will have great English but it's important to look at them from a statistical point of view - cuers remain the top performers among deaf kids using other methods, even when you take their learning disabilities into the picture.

Yesterday, I went to a park with a very special lady who has been using cued speech since she was a kid. Everyone knows she's not "normal" but she was a very freindly lady and she always smiled. She has poor comprehension of abstract ideas. Despite her limited intellect, her English is FAR much better than most deaf signers I know.

Do I know cuers who have crappy English? Definitely! But at least, you'd know how their English is! I have corrected their English a few times. :)

I really love cuem/cued speech for what it does. I really do. That's the ONLY way to truly see English on a phonological level. SEE doesn't work that way.

Cued Speech is NOT the cure for all but it is something that deaf educators should seriously look into it and use it for a long term use.
 
Where would the Cued Speech conference being held at? I didn't find when or where in any of those two links unless I missed it.
 
Where would the Cued Speech conference being held at? I didn't find when or where in any of those two links unless I missed it.
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Towson, Maryland - july 20 to 23.
 
thanks netrox! Just being kind of a devil's advocate, in putting those questions on the table. I know that a lot of experts point to the high acheivement of auditory verbals as "proof" that it's a legitmate system. However, very often, the sucess might have to do with hyperinvolved parents. Does Cuem raise verbal IQ?
 
Cued Speech are proving to be beneficial not only to the deaf and hard-of hearing, but also in helping children with Down Syndrome, autism, and other communication disorders to communicate effectively with their families and within society.

This is groundbreaking news to me. I'm surprised that linguists aren't paying more attention to the subject of cued speech.
 
deafdyke said:
Does Cuem raise verbal IQ?
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Verbal IQ? What's that?

"This is groundbreaking news to me. I'm surprised that linguists aren't paying more attention to the subject of cued speech."
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There's a book called, "Cued Language Structure" and it explains cued languages from a linguistic point of view. It radically challenges the common beliefs about cued speech/cuem. In fact, it was the first to coin the term "cuem." For example, it rejects the notion that speech is required for using cued languages; explains why you cannot just cue what it sounds like, and why cuem has its own distinctive phonetic features, separate from speech. For example, for hearing people, the sound "t" and "d" may sound almost alike but for cuers, they look so different.

It explains why cued languages are linguistically complete while signed English does not meet the rules of linguistics (it says only ASL is linguistically correct). It says that cued speech should not be viewed as a speechreading supplement. The arguments that the book gave defintely require a paradigm thinking to what languages are about.

The authors of Cued Language Structure were the first to coin "cuem" and personally, I like it a lot better than "Cued speech."
 
When you take an IQ test, there are 2 scores.....One is the base score and the other is a verbal score. Verbal IQ measures how well you've mastered language
 
me_punctured said:
Cued Speech are proving to be beneficial not only to the deaf and hard-of hearing, but also in helping children with Down Syndrome, autism, and other communication disorders to communicate effectively with their families and within society.
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I'm not sure how much of a benefit CS/Cuem would provide for these kind of children. CS is all about acquiring language, and unless they have hearing losses, the children can just simply acquire their native language in their household.

The minute people start to use CS as a communications tool as opposed to it being used as a language-building tool, is when it starts to lose its effectiveness. Maybe I'm missing something, as I really do not know much about children having exceptionalities such as Autism, Down's, etc.
 
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