New Approach on Deaf Literacy Heartening

This undated photo provided by Gallaudet University shows Dr. R. Orin Cornett, who created Cued Speech in 1966, while he was a vice president at Gallaudet University in Washington. Cornett, who died in 2002, was working to create a system that would help improve literacy rates among deaf students by adding visual cues to lip reading. (AP Photo/Gallaudet University Archives) (AP)

Many deaf people would prefer that deaf babies begin learning ASL from birth. But 95 to 97 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents, who usually don't learn sign language quickly enough to be able to teach it to their children, LaSasso said.

"You just can't expect them to learn a new language, frankly," LaSasso said. "It's not reasonable."

Many parents can become fluent with cuing in about six months, LaSasso said.

Most cuers are concentrated on the East Coast, but the system is used in all 50 states and has been modified for 67 different languages, said Sarina Roffe, now president of the National Cued Speech Association.

Manually Coded English, which uses sign language to help translate English, has been more widely used over the last 40 years than cued speech, but LaSasso said it has failed to improve literacy rates. Translating the hundreds of thousands of words of English with about 6,000 signs leaves out many words.

"That means the kids are getting fragmented input," LaSasso said. "Compared to the signing of English, cuing more clearly and completely conveys English at the same level that speech does."

Her findings were published in an article with Gallaudet professor Melanie Metzger in the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education in 1998. Last spring it was selected for a 100-year commemorative work by Oxford University Press.

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On the Net:

National Cued Speech Association: http://www.cuedspeech.org/

Gallaudet University: http://www.gallaudet.edu/