Cued Speech Workshop Success

              Cued Speech Workshop success
Editor, The Times:
Thank you for the newspaper-cov-erage
regarding the Cued Speech
Workshop which was held during April
at the LSU Medical Center under the
sponsorship of the Mid-City Kiwanis
Club, the Mollie E. Webb Speech and
Hearing Center, Department of
Audiology and Speech Pathology, LSU
Medical Center-Shreveport. The
workshop was attended by more than
100 people, many of whom are begin-ning
to use Cued Speech in communica-tion
with the deaf and hearing impaired.
A group is meeting on Tuesday nights at
the Mollie E. Webb Speech and Hearing
Center to work on Cued Speech skills.
This workshop marks the introduc-tion
of Cued Speech into the Shreveport
area.
Cued Speech is a visually explicit
phonetic communication system which
facilitates lip reading through the use of
eight hand cues in four vowel positions
around the mouth. It is not a sign
language, but a system which enables
the deaf or hard of hearing person to
accurately lip read each sound in each
spoken word in combination with lip
reading. It can be used by hearing
impaired persons trained in either the
aural-oral or total communication
methods.
The benefits to persons who have
used Cued Speech have been numerous.
These are a few of the advantages that
have been reported:
(1.) It takes the guess work out of lip
reading. Because each sound can be
clearly seen by the deaf person, they
can accurately lip read what is being
said. Even dialect accents are normally
developed because the words are cued
by each sound as you would pronounce
the word.
(2.) It aids in vocabulary acquisition.
Vocabulary develops more rapidly
because the deaf person can accurately
see each word and identify it as would a
hearing person — through normal ex-posure
through a situation.
(3.) It develops normal language pat-terns.
Because each word can be ac-curately
lip read, the deaf person learns
more normal speech patterns including
articles, pronouns, plurals, idioms, col-loquialism,
etc.
(4.) It aids in the development of
reading skills. Because the cued speech
system is based on phonetics, children
learn to read more easily and have been
found to function at or higher than their
normal age/grade reading level. This is
important since for a deaf person read-ing
can be his "window on the world." It
also aids in spelling skills for the same
reason.
(5.) It develops better lip readers.
Research has been done which indicates
that children who know Cued Speech
can lip read more accurately even when
cues are not used than "good" lip re-aders
who do not know Cued Speech.
Cued Speech has made important
contributions to the communication
skills and education of the hearing im-paired
in the areas where it is in use. It
is hoped that Shreveport will be one of
those areas soon.
Thanks again for the publicity. Many
of the people who came learned about
the workshop from the articles you ran
in the paper.
GAY WOLCOTT, M.S., C.C.C.-A
Audiologist
LSU Medical Center
Shreveport