Cued Speech was adapted to the Russian language in 1983 by Dr. Cornett and Knox. It was revised in 1991 by Metyluk and Evchik. Audio lessons are available.
In undated explanatory notes, Dr. Cornett writes:
Cued Speech is a phonemic system, and is not intended to furnish discrimination among allphones. In the trial Russian adaptation there are two excpetions to the rule: two allophones that are entered separately from their parent phonemes. These are [æ] and [ɨ]. The latter is considered important enough to be distinguished from [i]. The former is identified in order to have a companion for [ɨ], since in Cued Speech it is necessary to have at least two sounds in each group, in order that the information visibale on the mouth must be used to distinguish them.
- The symbol æ, which is actually an IPA symbol, refers to the allophone of /a/ which occurs only between palatalized consonants. It is similar to the sound of the vowel in British Southern English in the words sat and hand.
- In the chart the symbol ə is for the neutral vowel, or the schwa, which is the sound given to unstressed o and unstressed a in Russian. It is the vocalic nucleus of each of those sounds.