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As published in Odyssey, Fall 2003
Cued Speech and American Sign Language...in PDF (7 pages, 46 kb)

Cued Speech and American Sign Language
Hand in Hand

By Harry Wood
First Person

Growing up with Cued Speech, the phonetically based visual communication system created by Dr. Orin Cornett, has had a significant impact on my life in more ways than I can count. I cannot list the many influences here, but I can tell you with 100 percent certainty that without cueing, I would not be the person I am today. However, I can also tell you with 100 percent certainty that without American Sign Language, or ASL, I would not be the person I am today.

Academic Life

When I was 21 months old, my parents discovered I had a profound bilateral sensorineural hearing loss that had most likely existed since birth. They were distraught, as any hearing parents would be. However, once they got over the initial shock, they became very determined to find a way to help me “survive in a hearing world” and in order to do that, they wanted me “to speak if possible.” They set out to explore their options at the time (the year was 1977). They only knew about the oral method or sign language. They did not know about cueing yet. They decided to place me in an oral program in Montgomery County, Maryland.

After one year of struggles and no progress, and a suggestion from my preschool teacher that a visual system could possibly help me, my parents learned about cueing. After seeing it in action and talking with parents of deaf children using cueing, they were very impressed by it. They liked the potential for me to learn “language, vocabulary, and reading development, in addition to speech.” So they switched me to the cueing program in the same county.

Even though I picked up cueing very quickly, the first few years were a struggle academically. I hated reading, even though I could do it, and I gave everyone a hard time with paying attention: teachers, transliterators, my folks, and any other professionals who worked with me. I did go through a lot of speech training, and I vividly remember my speech teachers from elementary school through high school. At the time, I enjoyed the teachers I had, even though the training and the repetitions always frustrated me. I spent all of my school days mainstreamed with cueing transliterators, with a little bit of time every day in a self-contained classroom.

I always did well in school, succeeding on both spelling and reading tests. However, I did not enjoy reading. It is not that I could not do it; on the contrary, I thought it was very easy. I simply did not like it. Suddenly, in the sixth grade, my teacher, Ms. Duranko, showed me how much fun reading can be. Reading became so exciting for me that soon I was buried in books constantly. I remember reading the Hardy Boys with so much enjoyment to the point that I would read with a light on in bed when my parents thought I had gone to sleep (Sorry, Mom and Dad!). My parents could not buy books fast enough for me to keep reading! With this enjoyment, unbeknownst to me, my English vocabulary and reading comprehension skyrocketed.

In middle school, I began to pick up sign language very slowly, but surely. I continued to use cueing as my main mode of communication, especially in the classroom. I maintained this direction until my junior year of high school, when I began to use a sign language interpreter due to a lack of transliterators and conflicting schedules at the time. By then I had become confident enough to accept this change from the coordinator for one class every day until my graduation. At Wichita State University in Kansas, I used a sign language interpreter full time since, at that time, cueing was not known in that area. I had no problems academically in college (aside from boredom in some lecture classes) and graduated cum laude.I eventually went to Gallaudet University, where I was fully immersed in American Sign Language, and I earned an M.A. in elementary deaf education.

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Family Life

My parents, despite the initial shock at discovering my hearing loss, endeavored to equip me for a future in the hearing world. They were very resolute in their expectations of me as well. They always encouraged me, never letting me use my hearing loss as an excuse for failure, and always cared for me in the best way they could.

My mother learned cueing, but my father never did become proficient at it. None of my other family members ever learned it. In my earlier years, I communicated mostly with my mom because she could cue and I understood her all the time. Conversations with my dad, brother, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins were through lipreading. I had become quite a skilled lipreader at a young age, thanks to my speech training, and improved with each passing year.

Although I have no recollection from my youngest years (or any year because, if you know me, then you know I have a terrible memory!), my parents tell me that my mother cued bedtime stories to me all the time and that I always enjoyed them. They even say that I begged my grandmother to read to me even though she never knew how to cue. It was not easy at family get-togethers since I could only do one conversation at a time. Many times the conversations were overlapping and I could not follow any of them. I often resigned myself to watching television, reading books, or finding other ways to entertain myself. This is one area that I am very sad about, but I know that I really could not do much in that situation. I would have loved to get to know everyone in my family in deeper ways and still am striving to do so today.

At the end of middle school, my family and I slowly made the transition from cueing to full-time lipreading. Currently, my mother only uses cueing as a supplement when I struggle to understand a certain word or sentence. I still do miss a lot if there are many people talking at the same time, but I have come to accept this as one of the obstacles I face in my daily life.

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Social Life

Growing up in a cueing-only program, I had only deaf friends. Although I did talk with my hearing peers, I never really became good friends with any of them. In middle school that changed, however. At that time, I was the only person in the middle school who knew how to cue. I told myself that I had to learn sign language if I wanted to make friends. So I slowly picked it up by socializing with my sign language counterparts. For me, that opened up another world that I had not yet experienced. By the time I graduated from high school, I had made many more friends through sign language. I was able to find people who had experiences similar to mine growing up and could connect with them. I now consider myself a fluent ASL user.

I met my lovely and intelligent wife, Lacey, who is hearing, at Gallaudet University in graduate school. We mainly use ASL in all our conversations, although sometimes I talk with her instead of signing. I am teaching her to cue and pretty soon she will be good, I know. I speak all the time with her family since they do not know cueing or sign language. I face similar struggles with them as I do with my own family.

Today, I do not use cueing a lot. However, with those friends that know only cueing, I am glad to use it. With friends that know both cueing and sign language, we choose to use sign language because we feel it is so much easier and expressive of our true selves. As for the“world out there” that my parents wanted me to survive in, I believe I do. Nonetheless, I know I face the same obstacles and struggles that many deaf people do. I sense this will always be the case for deaf people everywhere, no matter how much cueing, sign language, or oral training is gained. Looking back on my life, cueing has provided me with many opportunities by allowing me to gain access to the English language through reading, vocabulary, and comprehension, consequently leading to increased accessibility and survival in the majority hearing world. ASL has provided me with more opportunities to meet deaf people, communication with friends, meaningful relationships, a chance to participate in rich culture, and a sense of identity.

* I refer to the system of Cued Speech as “cueing” because it is not necessary to learn speech to be successful with cueing.