Carol LaSasso

Cued Speech for Enhancing Speech Perception and First Language Development of Children With Cochlear Implants

Nearly 300 million people worldwide have moderate to profound hearing loss. Hearing impairment, if not adequately managed, has strong socioeconomic and affective impact on individuals. Cochlear implants have become the most effective vehicle for helping profoundly deaf children and adults to understand spoken language, to be sensitive to environmental sounds, and, to some extent, to listen to music. The auditory information delivered by the cochlear implant remains non-optimal for speech perception because it delivers a spectrally degraded signal and lacks some of the fine temporal acoustic structure. In this article, we discuss research revealing the multimodal nature of speech perception in normally-hearing individuals, with important inter-subject variability in the weighting of auditory or visual information. We also discuss how audio-visual training, via Cued Speech, can improve speech perception in cochlear implantees, particularly in noisy contexts. Cued Speech is a system that makes use of visual information from speechreading combined with hand shapes positioned in different places around the face in order to deliver completely unambiguous information about the syllables and the phonemes of spoken language. We support our view that exposure to Cued Speech before or after the implantation could be important in the aural rehabilitation process of cochlear implantees. We describe five lines of research that are converging to support the view that Cued Speech can enhance speech perception in individuals with cochlear implants.

The interaction of reader and task factors in the assessment of reading comprehension

This study examined the effects of selected reader and task variables on reading comprehension performance. Fifty deaf students and 61 hearing students of comparable reading skill level were blocke...

Reading for Deaf and Hearing Readers: Qualitatively and/or Quantitatively Similar or Different? A Nature versus Nurture Issue

The authors discuss whether the covert reading process differs qualitatively and/or quantitatively for hearing and deaf peers and whether formal reading instruction should be different for deaf and hearing students. The authors argue that hearing status (deaf, hearing) is less important in learning to read than environmental factors, including: (a) the richness of the early linguistic environment leading to an age-appropriate L1 prior to formal reading instruction and (b) clear, complete visual access to the instructional language (e.g., English, Spanish, American Sign Language) used to deliver curriculum via conventional or English Language Learner methods. In U.S. schools attended by 89% of deaf students, English is “regularly” used as the language of instruction (Gallaudet Research Institute, 2013, p. 11). Of the available communication systems for conveying English conversationally (oral-aural methods, Manually Coded English sign systems, Cued Speech), only Cued Speech is structurally capable of affording clear, complete visual access to English.