Leybaert and her colleagues (Alegria, Dejean, Capouillez, & Leybaert, 1990; Alegria, Lechat, & Leybaert, 1990; Charlier, 1992; Leybaert, 1993; Leybaert & Alegria, 1993; Leybaert & Alegria, 1995; Leybaert & Charlier, 1996; Perier, Charlier, Hage, & Alegria, 1988) have demonstrated that deaf individuals who have been exposed to Cued Speech both at home and at school perform comparably to hearing peers on tasks of phonemic awareness, internal speech recoding, phonics, and spelling and perform generally better than their deaf counterparts from oral or signing backgrounds. In a recently published study (LaSasso, Crain, & Leybaert, 2003), the rhyming abilities of deaf college students from Cued Speech backgrounds were comparable to those of their hearing peers and better than those of deaf students who came from non-Cued Speech backgrounds.
Eden, Lansdale, Cappell, Crain, Zeffiro, and LaSasso (submitted for publication) report results of a study that incorporated functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) brain imaging techniques to learn about how deaf individuals from Cued Speech backgrounds process phonological information. In that study, participants were matched on a word reading task with hearing peers and asked to perform phoneme deletion tasks while in an fMRI scanner. Results of that study revealed that 1) the phonological abilities of Cued Speech users were comparable to their hearing peers, and 2) Cued Speech users use the same parts of the brain, including the so-called“auditory” cortex, to process phonological information as their hearing peers. This study provides fMRI evidence that deaf individuals acquire phonological information comparable to hearing peers. It also suggests that deaf students process phonological information in the same parts of the brain as hearing individuals.