Cued Speech is a modality for spoken languages that was developed by Dr. R. Orin Cornett at Gallaudet University in 1966. Cornett recognized that distinguishing features of spoken sounds were not available to deaf children and that lipreading was not reliable. He then devised manual signals that, when delivered with the information on the mouth, reintroduce distinguishing features so that all the building blocks of English are unambiguous in a visual channel. This means that deaf children have visual access to the phoneme stream of English.
Handshapes represent consonant phonemes. Placements and movements represent vowel phonemes. Cued Speech has been adapted to more than 50 languages and dialects.
While Cued Speech is the formal name of the system that Dr. Cornett developed, it does not represent speech. The cues do not show how we speak; that is, how we form consonants and vowels using our lips, tongue, and teeth.
Since we cue the phoneme stream, we are actually conveying language information at the most basic linguistic level.
Other terms to know: