The role of Cued Speech in language processing by deaf children : An overview

Cued Speech (CS) is a system of manual cues that combined to the lipread information conveys visually the traditionally-spoken languages at the phonemic level. It i s argued here that exposure to CS allows deaf children to develop accurate phonological representations which can support rhyme judgment, phonological short-term memory, use of grapheme-to-phoneme correspondences in reading and spelling. Strong differences systematically appear between those children who have been exposed early and late to CS, suggesting that early exposure induces the development of left hemisphere specialization for language processing. The question of contribution of CS to linguistic development of children fitted with cochlear implant is discussed.