Miracle of my speech.

I can’t count the number of times that I’ve met people and several weeks or even months later they tell me how they couldn’t even tell I had a hearing loss. Those that have heard me talk can attest to this. Speech is something that many of you may take for granted but something I absolutely treasure. I beam and silently give thanks to my loving Heavenly Father whenever I receive a compliment on mine. As I previously explained, my parents wanted me to speak and ASL was not the method that was going to help me with that.

Cued Speech is a visual communication system — mouth movements of speech combined with “cues” to make all the sounds (phonemes) of spoken language look different. When cueing English, eight hand shapes distinguish consonant sounds and four locations near the mouth distinguish vowel sounds. A hand shape and a location together cue a syllable. With this, I was able to hear my Mom speak a word, mouth the word and then see the different sign locations and hand shapes in order distinguish the similar articulations from the different sounds they produce. For example: put your fingers on your neck where your voice box (vocal folds) are. Then make a “p” sound a couple times then make a “b” sound. You notice that the articulation of these two sounds is the exact same but the “p” is unvoiced (does not move the vocal folds) and the “b” sound is voiced (vibrates vocal folds-you can feel the vibrations). So with the hand shape # 1 as the “p” sound and hand shape # 4 as the “b”, you can now distinguish whether a word is put or but even without voicing it. I think the most amazing part about Cued Speech is that it really teaches children, with any type of speech impediment, how to correctly annunciation, articulate and pronounce each and every phoneme in a matter of 8 simple hand shapes. I felt like my family had our own little language because my parents could be across the room and not make a sound but by cueing we could have a whole conversation and no one else in the room would have a clue what we were talking about. Now I’ve gotten to the point where I can read people’s lips and know what they are saying. I use this skill in just about every conversation that I have, so if you notice I am staring at your lips, that is why, I apologize. I’m not trying to be creepy. I use lip reading when I have my aids out, in big noisy crowds, or my batteries decide to die at inconvenient times. I have plenty of stories I will continue to share about depending on my lip reading- it’s proved to be very, very helpful and really fun. My speech wasn’t or even is now perfect. I went through years of speech therapy (all the way through elementary school). I vividly remember the room where I learned annunciate my /r/s, keep my tongue in on my s’s and my /th/s. I can still hear my therapist giving me the advice to “park” the tip of my tongue on the roof of my mouth when I wasn’t talking to help correct my articulation. I still remember how annoyed I was at my interpreter that she couldn’t cue the 8^th hand shape right when she cued ‘you’ she would flip it so that instead of her first finger being placed on her chin, she’d turn her hand and put the second finger on her chin. I finally told my mom and we did away with interpreters altogether.

Cued Speech Chart

My family read our scriptures every morning as a family, and I know for a fact that reading out loud really helped to practice and improve my speech. I recommend reading out loud for anyone that wants to have smoother annunciation, articulation, and pronunciation or rhetoric in general. I don’t know why our family was one of the blessed families to be divinely guided to this wonderful tool, but I will be forever grateful for Cued Speech and the miracle of speech that it gave to me and communication to our family. I highly recommend it to families that want their deaf or hard of hearing child to not only talk but to talk beautifully.