The Role of Cued Speech in the Development of Spanish Prepositions

Santana Hernandez, Rafael. Torres Monreal, Santiago. Garcia Orza, Javier.

American Annals of the Deaf, Volume 148, Number 4, Fall 2003, pp. 323-332 (Article)

Published by Gallaudet University Press DOI: 10.1353/aad.2003.0026

For additional information about this article http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/aad/summary/v148/148.4hernandez.html

Access Provided by Utah State University Libraries at 10/27/11 3:32PM GMT THE ROLE OF CUED SPEECH IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF SPANISH PREPOSITIONS

HE AIM OF THE PRESENT STUDY was to advance the knowledge of the linguistic development of students with prelingual profound deafness, especially the acquisition and use of prepositions in Spanish, a lexical category with an important role in verbal comprehension. The researchers sought to learn the level of mastery students with prelingual profound deafness can achieve in the command of prepositions, depending on the system of communication they have been exposed to: classic oralism, Cued Speech, or signed language. The results show that the different systems of communication contribute, to different degrees, to the acquisition of Spanish prepositions, with the best results being obtained with Cued Speech.

RAFAEL SANTANA HERNÁNDEZ, Children with prelingual profound use of Spanish prepositions. Though, SANTIAGO TORRES MONREAL, deafness generally experiences slower in the past, lexical development did AND AVIERTARCÍA RZA J G O verbal linguistic development than not raise as much interest as phonol- hearing children (Lepot-Froment & ogy or syntax, nowadays it is consid-

SANTANA IS A PROFESSOR IN THE DEPARTMENT Clerebaut, 1996; Mogford, 1988; ered an important subject because of OF EDUCATION, UNIVERSITY OF LAS PALMAS, Torres, Rodríguez, Santana, & its impact on later morphosyntactic CANARY ISLANDS, SPAIN. TORRES AND GARCÍA González, 1995). This verbal linguistic development (Locke, 1997). ARE BOTH PROFESSORS IN THE FACULTY OF delay becomes apparent in these Our starting point is the classifica- PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF MALÁGA, SPAIN. children’s shorter mean length utter- tion of the lexicon (Fries, 1952, for ance, their greater use of simple sen- English; Alcina & Blecua, 1975, for tences, their limited variety of syntac- Spanish) in content words (nouns, tic constructions, and their relatively verbs, adjectives, and adverbs), and in less frequent use of (in this order) de- function words (articles, auxiliaries, terminants, pronouns, prepositions, prepositions, connectors, and pro- adjectives, and connectors. nouns). According to this classifica- In the present article, we focus on a tion, people who are deaf make specific aspect of lexical-semantic de- greater and better use of the semantic velopment: the acquisition and early categories than of the grammatical

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VOLUME 148, NO. 4, 2003 AMERICAN ANNALS OF THE DEAF THE ROLE OF CUED SPEECH ones (Brannon, 1968; Cooper, 1967; tion. Deaf participants seemed to aspects of complex grammars, among Goda, 1964; Odom, Blanton, & adopt the strategy of selecting the which would be the use of preposi- Nunnally, 1967). Deaf children ex- words with semantic content in the tions, depends both on the linguistic posed to classic oral systems, those sentence, apply thematic roles to them input modality and on the moment of based on speechreading and auditive depending on their order of appear- exposure to those aspects (Kim, rests, make up their own signs to des- ance in the sentence (subject-verb-ob- Relkin, & Hirsch, 1997), and that in ignate objects that are easily repre- ject), and, from this, guess the answer. deaf people both factors are altered. sented, while producing very few signs In the face of classic oralism’s In the face of this somber prospect, related to function words (Goldin- weakness, in recent decades signed Cued Speech, as a speech augmenta- Meadow, 1979). Researchers investi- and bilingual systems have gained tion system, could offer some hope, gating the order and the moment of much interest. The oral linguistic de- as long as two requirements were met: acquisition of prepositions have no- velopment of deaf people with deaf (a) that Cued Speech were used to ticed that both deaf and hearing parents who had sign as a first lan- make all speech visible to a deaf per- people follow the same order—that is, guage has been studied. Geers, Moog, son at the same level at which audition space, time, and relational prepositions and Schick (1984) have shown that makes it perceptible to a hearing per- (Kluwin, 1982)—while they differ deaf people with deaf parents have son (input’s quantity and quality fac- greatly in regard to moment of acqui- better oral linguistic development than tors), and (b) that the deaf person re- sition (Clark, 1973). Kempt and Max- deaf people exposed to classic oralism ceived very early exposed to this well (1989) compared a group of hear- or signed oral language. Nevertheless, system (time factor). ing children ages 6 to 9 years with a a comparison of hearing and deaf group of deaf adolescents ages 12 to study participants disclosed big differ- Speech Perception: 20 years in a task with space preposi- ences; for instance, 8-year-old deaf The Main Problem tions in sentences implying a prag- participants produced only 70% of In an intuitive way, speech perception matic conflict, for example, “The glass the simple syntactic structures that 4- is associated with audition, save for is in the water.” The hearing study par- year-old hearing participants pro- very specific exceptions such as the ticipants, who were, on average, 10 duced. Research by Taeschner, four enumerated by Summerfield years younger than the deaf partici- Devescovi, and Volterra (1988) and (1987): a signal-noise ratio unfavorable pants, did not make any mistakes, Volterra and Bates (1989) points in to the signal, auditive deficiency, laryn- while the deaf participants, regardless similar directions. gectomy, and conflict between auditive of their age or the form of communi- The delay in vocabulary acquisition and visual information (see also cation they used, made mistakes both is seen as a serious problem (Locke, Campbell, Dodd, & Burnham, 1998; in electing prepositions and under- 1997); this viewpoint is supported by Dodd & Campbell, 1987). This standing the sentence. neurolinguistic research in cortical ac- premise persisted until the mid-1970s, Dubuisson, Vincent-Durroux, and tivation and verbal information pro- sustained by the argument that people Nadeau (1991), analyzing 14-year-old cessing, which provides data on sig- who are born blind develop language deaf adolescents’ oral productions, nificant differences between deaf and normally, excluding small alterations in saw that more than 50% of the sen- hearing neurophysiological records the order of production of certain tences these adolescents produced (Neville, 1991; Neville & Babelier, phonemes (Campbell et al., 1998; were agrammatical; they made mis- 1996). There are two types of differ- Dodd & Campbell, 1987). A thought- takes in most of the lexical categories, ences: On one hand, it has been no- provoking article by McGurk and prepositions included. According to ticed that, in hearing people, different McDonald, “Hearing Lips and Seeing the authors, these mistakes are also lexical categories are reflected in dif- Voices” (1976), in which sight’s contri- made by advanced or university deaf ferent foci of cortical activity; on the bution to speech perception is proven, students exposed to sign language, other hand, specific cortical activity made things change. In McGurk and signed oral language, or both. The has been registered when hearing McDonald’s classic experiment, study comparison between hearing and deaf people process function words, while participants received input via two study participants shows not only a this activity is not reflected in deaf noncongruent sources of informa- substantial delay in the deaf partici- people when doing the same task. It tion, visual and auditive. For instance, pants but also deviations in acquisi- could be that the acquisition of certain while study participants were visually

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VOLUME 148, NO. 4, 2003 AMERICAN ANNALS OF THE DEAF presented with the articulation of the Villalba, Fernández, and Ross (1996), series of hand complements (see Fig- segment /ga/ (consonantic voiced in a word identification task with 30 ure 1 for an example of La Palabra glottal plosive sound), by audition they children with prelingual profound Complementada ). A hand comple- were presented with /ba/ (consonantic deafness who were between the ages ment consists of three parameters, voiced bilabial plosive sound). In this of 8 and 15 years, got a 61.4% identi- which are perceived simultaneously: situation, the study participants would fication rate with LR and a 69.0% rate say they perceived /da/. But if they with audition plus LR. • Hand location, in relation to the were asked to close their eyes, they face. There are three positions in would say they perceived /ba/. What The Contribution of Cued Spanish: side position for /a/, is particularly interesting about this Speech to Speech Perception chin position for /e,o/, and throat effect observed by McGurk and For centuries, a system that could position for /i,u/. McDonald is not only the spontaneous make speech visible to the deaf has • Hand shape. In Spanish there are nature of speechreading but, above all, been dreamt of. In recent years, several eight shapes in all, which are used its demanding or imperative nature: systems have been developed, the to deambiguate consonants. The study participant does not delib- most popular being Cued Speech • Hand movement. In Spanish there erately chooses the help of (Cornett, 1967), known in its Spanish are four in all. The two main ones speechreading, but its effect occurs version as La Palabra Complementada are forward movement, a soft without the participant being able to (The Complemented Word). Cued movement that goes with a direct neutralize it. Speech makes speech perception pos- syllable (consonant-vowel), for These data have important implica- sible through sight, thanks to its two example, /ma/; and flick move- tions for people who are deaf. They basic components: LR and a limited ment, a brief and energetic move- have to elaborate phonological repre- Figure 1 sentations from their residual audition, Spanish Cued Speech: An Example (Torres, 1988; Torres & Ruiz, 1996) but, above all, from visual information perceived through lip-facial reading (LR). It seems appropriate at this point to report on some research that shows the restrictions on speech perception faced by people who are deaf. Nicholls and Ling (1982), doing research in English, reported that 25% of word discrimination was exclusively in the visual modality (i.e., LR only), and 42% with auditive prosthesis plus LR. Cornett and Daisey (1992), also doing research in English, reported that deaf study participants exposed to series of 100 meaningless syllables (na, wi, se, mu, etc.) correctly identified 20% to 30%. Deaf people studied by Charlier and Paulissen (1986, cited in Charlier, 1994), who were doing research in French, got a 66% rate with LR and 73% with audition plus LR, in a task consisting of word identification. Charlier, Hage, Algería, and Périer (1990) got identical results in a task consisting of sentence recogni- tion. Doing research in Spanish,

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ment that goes with any conso- of communication they had been ex- The Role of Cued Speech in nant outside the consonant-vowel posed to (classic oralism, signed oral, Function Word Development sequence, for example, /m/ in / sign language, and Spanish Cued The premise of Cued Speech is that if am/. Speech), who were assigned a task a child who is deaf is exposed to consisting of the identification of speech in a clear and distinctive way The hand complement is, therefore, words and pseudowords. In the audi- during the first years of life, that child the simultaneous combination of po- tion-plus-LR experimental condition, will develop an oral language equal to sition, shape, and movement, which, the results obtained by the different the hearing child’s, except that the having no linguistic meaning by itself, groups on the word discrimination deaf child will be using sight as the is used to deambiguate speechreading, task were Spanish Cued Speech main way of receiving information. thus making speech visible in its total- 82.8%, classic oralism 70%, sign lan- Nevertheless, more research is needed ity. guage 66%, and signed oral language to validate this hypothesis. Hage Various studies focusing on deaf 28%, while for the pseudoword dis- (1994) studied 170 deaf children be- people’s speech perception through crimination task the results were Span- tween the ages of 11 and 14 years and Cued Speech (English: Clarke & Ling, ish Cued Speech 16%, classic oralism classified them into six groups, ac- 1976; Nicholls & Ling, 1982; Quenin, 18%, sign language 19%, and signed cording to the system of communica- 1992; French: Alegría, Charlier, & oral language 3% (Santana, 1999). tion followed at home, school, or Mattys, 1995; Charlier et al., 1990; These data contrast with those ob- both. Evaluated on different linguistic Spanish: Santana, 1999; Torres, 1988) tained by the Spanish Cued Speech aspects (such as vocabulary, gender, have opened a new perspective on the group in the Cued Speech experimen- prepositions, and determinants), the education of the deaf. From these tal condition: 92% for words and 52% Cued Speech group was always signifi- studies some conclusions can be for pseudowords. One could argue cantly superior to the rest of the drawn. that if Cued Speech makes the whole groups in the experiment. Afterward, First, deaf children who receive of speech visible, how can the 52% Hage subdivided the Cued Speech speech through residual audition plus for pseudowords be understood when group into CS+ (study participants Cued Speech achieve speech percep- the result should be closer to 100%? who had been exposed to Cued tion levels very close to those obtained The explanation could be that the Speech at home before they were 36 by hearing children through audition study participant looks for meanings months old) and CS- (study partici- (Santana, 1999). Second, different in the speech segments introduced to pants who had been exposed to Cued modalities of speech introduction him or her, and, when meanings are Speech after the age of 3 years). In produce different effects on percep- not found, doubts or does not answer. general, the CS+ group performed tion: according to Nicholls and Ling, As Cued Speech removes the ambi- better than the CS- group. On the 30% and 25% for syllables and words, guities related to LR, one would think preposition task, the CS+ group per- respectively, through LR, in contrast that those study participants exposed formed as well as the hearing control to 80% and 95% for syllables and to the system for several years should group, although the difference of age words, respectively, through Cued not have problems with verbal com- between the deaf and the hearing par- Speech. Charlier et al. find similar prehension. Nevertheless, they have ticipants leaves some questions open scores in French, and Torres and problems when exposure to the sys- for future research. These results rein- Santana in Spanish. The latter (the lead tem occurs after the age of 3 years. A force the hypothesis on the existence author of the present article) has a satisfactory answer to this problem of critical periods for the development special interest in these findings be- would require more research, and with of different linguistic aspects, includ- cause they have facilitated interpreta- study participants whose only system ing vocabulary acquisition. tion of data on the knowledge and use of communication between birth and of the Spanish prepositions, the main age 3 years had been Cued Speech. A Aims of the Research for the object of study of the present work, group of Spanish deaf people with Present Study which consists of research carried out such characteristics has already been In relation to the Spanish preposi- with 68 profoundly deaf Spanish chil- formed, and research results will be tions, the present study tested two hy- dren, classified into four different available in the next few years. potheses: groups according to the main system

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VOLUME 148, NO. 4, 2003 AMERICAN ANNALS OF THE DEAF • The augmentative systems of contra (against), desde (since, from), participant to one of three communication, which make entre (between, among), hacia (to- groups: the oral group, the Span- speech visible in a clear and dis- ward, around, about), hasta (up to, to, ish Cued Speech group, and the tinctive way, will play a decisive until, till), para (for, to, toward), según Spanish Sign Language group. role in oral linguistic develop- (according to, depending on), sin ment. It is expected that Cued (without), sobre (on, over, above, The characteristics of the groups are Speech, in this case Spanish Cued about, upon), and tras (behind, after). presented in Table 1. Speech, as a system that removes Empty Spanish prepositions are a (at, Because the experimental task re- the visual ambiguity of speech, every, per, to, on, by), con (with, by), quired the ability to read sentences, the will make it possible to be aware de (of, about, from, in, with), en (in, study participants’ reading skills were of the less perceptible segments on, at, into, by, from), and por (be- evaluated. Only participants with a of speech, among which are the cause of, for, by, in, at, through, per). reading age equal or superior to 8 prepositions. years, as measured by a standardized • It is expected that, in this preposi- Method test, Batería de Evaluación de los tion task, study participants using Study Participants Procesos Lectores de los Niños de Spanish Cued Speech will show a Thirty-five deaf students were picked Educación Primaria (Battery for the higher level of performance than from 29 educational centers in five dif- Evaluation of Reading Processes in participants exposed to other aug- ferent regions of Spain. Participants in Primary Education), commonly mentative systems of communi- the experiment all met four criteria: known as PROLEC (Cuetos, 1996), cation, although this effect in this were included in the data. With this research will not be as strong as 1. All were prelingually profoundly condition, we were trying to guarantee desired, as the participants in this deaf (onset and detection before that the difficulties with prepositions experiment have been partially ex- age 12 months). were not due to problems with basic posed to Spanish Cued Speech. 2. All had neurosensorial bilateral decoding skills. The IQs of the partici- auditive loss, according to the pants were measured with the manipu- In the data analysis, reference will be BIAP classification, with a mean lative scale of the Weschler Intelli- made to the difference between full loss in the better ear at the fre- gence Scale for Children; those who Spanish prepositions, which are used quencies of 250, 500, 1000, and scored below their chronological mean for a reduced number of perfor- 2000 Hz., equal to 100 dB. were eliminated from the analysis. On mances according to their meaning, 3. No associated impairment was the basis of these criteria, three groups and empty Spanish prepositions, more present that could by itself could of deaf people and one group of abstract and ambiguous, which appear cause severe language delay. hearing people were formed: as simple linking marks with many 4. All had been consistently ex- possibilities of relation, and whose posed, for at least for 3 consecu- • Oral group: Deaf participants ex- meaning depends both on the word tive years, to one of three sys- posed to classic oral systems, in they relate to and on the term they in- tems: classic oralism, Spanish which verbal input is presented troduce (Alcina & Blecua, 1975). Full Cued Speech, or Spanish Sign through speechreading and audi- Spanish prepositions are ante (before, Language. This variable was used tive rests, and the output through in the face of), bajo (under, below), as the criterion for assigning each speech and writing. The commu-

Table 1 Characteristics of the Sample (N = 52)

Characteristic Hearing group Oral group Spanish Cued Spanish Sign (control) Speech group Language group

n 17 16 12 7 Mean age (years, months) 8:3 12:4 11:7 11:4 Age range (years, months) (8:0-8:11) (10:4-13:8) (10:2-13:8) (9.0-13:8) Mean hearing loss (dB) -- 100 104 101

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nication system of the family and attending the same schools as the Materials school was mainly oral. deaf participants. Members of the Each item consisted of a simple sen- • Spanish Cued Speech group: Deaf control group were to be close in tence in which the preposition, which participants exposed to Spanish reading age of the members of had been replaced by suspension Cued Speech in rehabilitation and the deaf groups; although, to points, was the key word. In the mak- school environments. This was avoid the “ceiling effect” when ing of the sentences, normative stud- not a pure Cued Speech group, as executing the planned task, we ies on Spanish preposition usage fre- most of its members had received were forced to lower the age to 8 quency and frequency order in a classic oral rehabilitation during years, 2 months. The members of students between the ages of 6 and 13 their first 3 years of life and only the control group were randomly years (Justicia, 1995; Justicia, Santiago, afterward were exposed to Cued selected by the researchers among Palma, Huertas, & Gutierrez, 1996) Speech, mainly at school. students whose performance on were taken into account, as well as the • Spanish Sign Language group: the PROLEC and IQ tests was frequency of Spanish prepositions Deaf participants with deaf par- within their chronological mean, gathered in the dictionary of frequen- ents, whose native language was and who belonged to the same cies by Alameda and Cuetos (1995). Spanish Sign Language. These sociocultural environments as the On the basis of these studies, it was children were included regardless study participants. estimated that a task should include 30 of whether they had received si- sentences, which guaranteed the pro- multaneous or subsequent oral re- In its final form, the sample consisted portional and sufficient presence of habilitation. of 52 children: 35 deaf and 17 hearing. each of the Spanish prepositions. A • Control group: Hearing children distinction was also made between full Figure 2 Spanish prepositions (10 sentences) Sample Page From the Task Booklet and empty Spanish prepositions (20 sentences). A greater number of sentences with empty prepositions was used because of these prepositions’ higher usage frequency, their higher level of abstraction, and their earlier acquisition (Aguado, 1995). The sentences were affirmative and imperative, with a simple syntactic structure of the subject-verb-object and subject-verb-complement type, with a mean length of 5.84 words. The vocabulary of the sentences consisted of words with a very high usage frequency in Spanish, following the dictionary of frequencies already men- tioned. The chance level of the task was 25%, as one and only one of the four options was correct. The sentences used in the task are listed in Table 2. The materials for the task were introduced to the students in a 34-page booklet, 21 cm wide by 15 cm high. Each page contained one item, which consisted of a drawing (top part of the page), a sentence below the draw-

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VOLUME 148, NO. 4, 2003 AMERICAN ANNALS OF THE DEAF ing, where the preposition had been of the task, several trials were made, possible answer was verified, as well as replaced by suspension points, plus with different normally hearing chil- the standard amount of time used and four prepositions to choose from, dren grouped by age. To avoid the the difficulty of the task. placed below the sentence (see Figure “ceiling effect” with this control 2). The first page of the booklet was a group, the reading age was lowered to Procedure blank page, followed by two pages 8 years, 2 months, the point where all The task was carried out individually at with practice items. The 30 pages with the requirements were accomplished. the study participants’ schools or edu- the task items followed. The booklet A trial with four students with special cational centers, in a place adequate to ended with an easily solvable item, educational needs (students with the researchers’ requirements. The placed there to determine if the study speech pathologies but without hear- task was explained individually using participant had been concentrating ing difficulties) was done, together the communication system with which during the task. Two rehearsal items with two more trials with 8 deaf study each child was most competent (oral, and the last item were not included in participants between the ages of 12 Spanish Cued Speech, or Spanish Sign the statistics and 15 years. In order to avoid the Language). The researcher made sure To test the materials and the proce- “floor” and “ceiling” effects, the de- that each child understood that in each dures, as well as the level of difficulty sign of each sentence with its only sentence there was one word, and only

Table 2 Sentences Used in the Experimental Task Item Sentence Answer Type of preposition (correct answers in bold)

1 Mamá entra … puntillas (a, con, de, en) Empty 2 Estos zapatos están hechos … mano (de, con, a, en) Empty 3 El policía le contestó ... chino (por, en, a, para) Empty 4 ¡Come ... los dedos! (a, por, para, con) Empty 5 Salimos ... Barcelona en avión (con, para, sin, en) Full 6 Papá sale ... la puerta (con, en, por, para) Empty 7 Juan lleva dos dias ... comer (por, en, a, sin) Full 8 El gato cae ... espaldas (por, con, en, de) Empty 9 Las ballenas viven … el mar (entre, sobre, en, para) Empty 10 El coche rojo es ... mi padre (a, de, con, en) Empty 11 Nosotros vamos a la playa … verano (para, en, por, de) Empty 12 Pedro sale ... su colegio (en, a, con, de) Empty 13 El tren se va … mañana (de, en, por, hasta) Full 14 La niña se va ... la calle (sobre, entre, en, a) Empty 15 El profesor pone el libro ... la mesa (sobre, hasta, entre, a) Full 16 Son las ocho ... la mañana (a, para, de, en) Empty 17 Pedro tiene sobresaliente … matemáticas (por, de, para, en) Empty 18 La entrada al cole es ... las nueve en punto (por, en, de, a) Empty 19 La maceta cayó ... el balcón (con, para, entre, desde) Full 20 ¡Empieza ya ... trabajar! (de, a, para, por) Empty 21 El Barcelona juega ... el Madrid (por, de, para, contra) Full 22 Pedro pide un lápiz ... su profesor (por, con, a, en) Empty 23 El barco va ... el puerto (de, con, sobre, hacia) Full 24 El niño se disfraza … payaso (con, a, de, en) Empty 25 Mi papá viene ... avión (para, en, de, con) Empty 26 Terminaré los deberes ... hoy y mañana (desde, hasta, entre, contra) Full 27 El ladrón amenazó … la pistola (por, a, en, con) Empty 28 Quiero los ejercicios ... mañana (a, en, para, por) Full 29 La muñeca está ... la cama (entre, sobre, junto a, bajo) Full 30 El árbol se partió ... la mitad ( en, para, de, por) Empty

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VOLUME 148, NO. 4, 2003 AMERICAN ANNALS OF THE DEAF THE ROLE OF CUED SPEECH one, missing, and that this word was ences between preposition types, de- component as the use of prepositions, always one out of the four appearing spite the supposition that empty showed significant differences from below the sentence. The child’s task prepositions, being more abstract, that of the other deaf groups (see Fig- was to circle the chosen word. The could be harder to understand. ure 3). study participants were told always to Differences between groups were The control group of hearing stu- give an answer, even in cases of doubt. explored through Scheffé post hoc dents showed great skill in executing Once the task was explained, the re- analysis. The analysis showed that the the task (93% correct responses). The searcher introduced two rehearsal scores achieved by the hearing control Spanish Cued Speech group obtains a items to make sure that the whole pro- group and the Spanish Cued Speech similar performance (88% correct), al- cess had been understood. deaf group were significantly higher though we have to take into account than those of the oral and Spanish that there were age differences be- Results Sign Language deaf groups. There tween the groups: The mean age of The proportion of correct responses were no significant differences be- the Spanish Cued Speech group was was regarded as the dependent vari- tween the hearing control group and 11 years, 7 months, and the mean age able. The data from the task are shown the Spanish Cued Speech deaf group. of the hearing group was 8 years, 3 in Table 3 as a function of groups and No differences between the Spanish months. type of preposition. Data processing Sign Language group and the oral The difference regarding preposi- was done by means of the statistics group arose. tion type has not been confirmed, package SPSS/PC+. An overall analy- which rules out the hypothesis that sis of variance (ANOVA) was per- Discussion hearing participants would get better formed on the data, considering the In the light of the data obtained in the results with full prepositions, which group (control, oral, Spanish Cued task and in relation to the first aim of carry a spatial and temporal meaning, Speech, and Spanish Sign Language) the work described in the present than with empty prepositions, which as the between-subject factor, and the study, we can state that the Spanish appear as simple linking marks with type of preposition (empty, full) as the Cued Speech deaf group, like the hear- many possibilities of relation (Alcina within-subject factor. The analysis ing control group, performed well in & Blecua, 1975). showed a highly reliable main effect of showing an understanding of Spanish The research we cited in the theo- group, F(3, 48) = 18.229, MSE = prepositions. (This was probably be- retical review shows that Cued Speech 0.916, p < .001, but a nonsignificant cause the Spanish Cued Speech deaf guarantees speech perception in gen- effect of type of preposition, F(1, 48) group had clear and complete speech eral, but with the task presented in the < 1. The interaction group by type of perception.) Despite the fact that present study we could be showing preposition was not significant, F(3, these deaf participants did not form Cued Speech’s helpfulness even for 48) = 1.2, MSE = 0.012, p = .32. As an early Cued Speech group, their lan- those least favored elements of speech Table 3 shows, there were no differ- guage development, in such a critical at the perceptive level: the preposi-

Table 3 Correct Responses (Percentages) by Group and Type of Preposition

Hearing group Oral group Spanish Cued Spanish Sign Total (n = 17) (n = 16) Speech group Language group (N = 52) (n = 12) (n = 7)

Empty prepositions 93.82 57.50 90.00 58.57 77.02 (8.01)* (24.29) (10.87) (22.31) (24.04)

Full prepositions 92.35 56.25 85.00 65.71 75.96 (9.7) (23.91) (14.46) (18.13) (22.95)

Total 93.14 57.08 88.33 60.95 (6.81) (23.2) (9.8) (19.97)

Note. *Throughout, standard deviations are provided in parentheses. See also Figure 3.

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VOLUME 148, NO. 4, 2003 AMERICAN ANNALS OF THE DEAF tions, which are considered linguisti- celed out. Naturally, this aspect needs Canaria), C.P. Giner de los Ríos (Gran cally as brief, short, unstressed, mono- additional research with study partici- Canaria), Dominicas (Gran Canaria), syllabic or bisyllabic words, with ab- pants who have been exposed to Cued Fuentelarreyna (Madrid), Centro de stract and context-related meaning. Speech, from the moment deafness is E.E. Ponce de León (Madrid), The study results support the idea that detected, as the only augmentative Entender y Hablar (Madrid), Centro Cued Speech makes speech visible to communication system. Our current de Rehabilitación Príncipe de Asturias the deaf and, with it, contributes to research focuses on this point. (Cartagena), Instituto Valenciano de the implicit learning of linguistic con- Audiofonología (Valencia), Sagrada tents that are difficult to teach—lin- Note Familia (Valencia). guistic aspects that, going beyond the The research for the present study was We are also grateful to the deaf and borders of speech as a medium of part of the investigation program de- hearing children who took part in this communication, are present in cogni- veloped by El Equipo de Investigación research, for their patience and kind- tive processes as important as working Modelo Oral Complementado (The ness. They agreed to devote part of memory, or in cognitive tasks as pow- Complemented Oral Model Research their time to this research, which has the erful for learning as reading. Group), which was formed by, among aim of understanding them better. It seems that the mastery of prepo- others, the authors of the present Correspondence should be sent to sitions depends on the spontaneous study. We thank the staff of the fol- Rafael Santana Hernández, Departamento and functional verbal communicative lowing schools for their active involve- de Educación, Universidad de Las Palmas interactions, as long as a clear and dis- ment in the development of this re- de Gran Canaria, Juana de Arco 1, 35004, tinctive speech perception is guaran- search: C.P. García Lorca (Málaga), Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain teed, as happens when Cued Speech is C.P. Tartessos (Málaga), C.P. Dr. ([email protected]); and Santiago used before the age of 3 years. In the Fleming (Málaga), C.P. Vicente Torres Monreal ([email protected]) or context of early exposure to Cued Alexandre (Marbella), C.P. Los Olivos Javier García Orza ([email protected]), Speech, the linguistic differences of (Málaga), C.P. Bentayga (Gran Departamento de Psicología Básica, age between hearing and deaf study Canaria), C.P. León y Castillo (Gran Universidad de Málaga, Facultad de participants should be reduced or can- Canaria), C.P. Reyes Católicos (Gran Psicología, 29071, Málaga, Spain. On December 17, 2002, while this article was being written, Dr. R. Orin Figure 3 Cornett (author of the 1967 article Correct Responses (Percentages) by Group and Type of Preposition “Cued Speech”) passed away. With the present research, the authors linked to 100 him professionally and personally would like to pay a posthumous trib- ute to him and his work.—The Au- 90 thors.

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