The role of lip-reading and cued speech in the processing of phonological information in French-educated deaf children

Deaf children exposed to Cued Speech (CS: system designed to reduce lipreading ambiguity) either before age 2 ("early") or later at school ("late") were presented with words and pseudowords with or without CS. The first goal was to examine the effects of adding CS to lip-reading on phonological perception. Results showed that CS substantially improved performance suggesting that CS corrects for lip-reading ambiguities. CS effects were significantly larger in the "early" than the "late" group, particularly with pseudowords. The second goal was to establish the way in which lip-reading and CS combine to produce unitary percepts. To address this issue, two types of phonological misperception resulting from CS's structural characteristics were analysed; substitutions based on the similarity between CS units, and intrusions of a third syllable for bisyllabic pseudowords requiring three CS units. The results showed that the frequency of such misperceptions increased with CS. The integration of CS and lip-read information is discussed as a function of CS's structural characteristics and the amount of exposure to CS.