Advances in Cognition, Education, and Deafness

Cued Speech and Language Acquisition: The Case of Grammatical Gender Morpho-Phonology

Cued Speech and Language Acquisition: The Case of Grammatical Gender Morpho-Phonology Catherine Hage Jesus Alegria Olivier Perier Speechreading is a difficult task for deaf people, and it is all the more so for the young deaf child who has to acquire language from his hearing parents' model, which is basically provided through the lips. Words with identical or similar lip images, the so-called "invisible" phonemes, and the distortions induced by co-articulation are the main factors that make speechreaqing on its own unreliable, unfit to allow clear perception of spoken language and consequently a poor support for language acquisition. Cued Speech (CS), designed by Cornett in 1967 and adapted to French under the name of Langage Parle Complete (LPC), is a set of systematic manual gestures made near the mouth while speaking, aimed at eliminating these drawbacks of speechreading. The combination of these gestures or cues with the normally available speechreading information is supposed to produce clear and precise visualization of spoken language. Currently available data show that school children familiar with CS can use it efficiently to understand spoken language, since sentences presented with CS are better understood than similar sentences presented without cues. This has been shown for English Cued Speech by Nicholls and Ling (1982) and for its French version by Perier, Charlier, Hage, and Alegria in 1984. These results demonstrate that CS is indeed efficient in reducing the ambiguities inherent in speechreading. At present there are little systematic data concerning the possibility of developing an ordinary language competence using CS as a source. Current observations of several profoundly deaf children with whom CS has been used consistently from the very beginning suggest that it develops that competence. Their 395 396 Programs for Applied Research spoken language understanding reaches levels closely approximating those of normally hearing children of the same age. However, no systematic analyses of their linguistic abilities are available to date, nor is it yet clear what cognitive mechanisms are involved in the processing of CS information. A series of experiments probing the cognitive question has been carried out, utilizing the priming paradigm in a lexical decision task on written material (see Alegria, Lechat & Leybaert 1988 for a preliminary report). The underlying hypothesis was that CS could contribute to the establishment of visual representations , giving access to the corresponding words, equivalent to the phonological ones built up through audition in hearing children. Until now these experiments have not yielded clear-cut results. This situation might be due to the fact that too few children with whom CS was utilized from infancy were available for those studies. It is intended to resume and expand investigations along this line now that more and more CS-raised children are reaching reading competency. Another current line of study in this laboratory is the collection of data concerning features of the language acquisition process. We plan to study a series of problems selected because they are recognized as especially difficult for deaf children educated by traditional aural-oral methods or by Total Communication. Some aspects of the linguistic competence precociously acquired by the normally hearing child are absent in the deaf, perhaps because of the opacity of speechreading signals. Typical French language morphology is usually expressed by affixes that are difficult to perceive in speechreading. Moreover, function words such as articles, prepositions, logical connectors, etc. which serve syntactic purposes , are often unstressed monosyllabic words. It is well established that deaf children have greater difficulties with these than with the so-called "open class" items like nouns, adjectives, verb radicals, etc. The general hypothesis underlying the present research is that CS, inasmuch as it reveals the entire oral message, should have specific effects upon morpho-syntactic development. Most of the available literature on the mastery of morpho-syntax has been done in English and, not surprisingly, relate to problems encountered in the endings -ing, -ed, -s, -er, -est, for example. Studies bearing on knowledge of morphology in orally educated deaf students conclude that 19-year-old deaf subjects fail to reach the level of 9-year-old hearing controls (Cooper 1967). More recently a study dealing with some fine aspects of Italian morpho-syntax shows a delayed development in tasks involving clitic pronouns and a qualitatively different pattern of results in the use of articles, but a normal development in pluralization (Taeschner, Devescovi & Volterra 1988). Grammatical gender in French is a good example of morpho-syntactic information that is partially carried by word endings. Several studies have demonstrated that...