Temporal motor organization of Cu French langu

Manual Cued Speech is an effective method used to enhance speech perception for deaf and hearing-impaired people. Thanks to this system, a speaker can disambiguate similar lip shapes by the addition of a manual cue near the face. While Cued Speech effectiveness for language acquisition is well-known, very few works aimed at investigating the temporal organization of Cued Speech production, i.e. the co-articulation of Cued Speech articulators : hand, fingers and mouth. In this framework, the present paper investigates the temporal organization of hand cue presentation focusing on finger gestures in relation to hand position, lip motion and the corresponding sound acoustic patterns in order to specify the nature of the syllabic structure of Cued Speech. Results show that both fingers and hand begin their movements largely before the acoustic consonant onset. Handshape formation and hand transition between two positions are completely realized at the beginning of the syllable.