Cued Speech is a manual system invented by Dr. R. Orin Cornett which, disambiguates spoken language at the level of the phoneme. It is a system of hand signals that allows people who are lipreading to differentiate between sounds that are impossible to tell apart using lipreading techniques alone.

Though, to a layperson, Cued Speech may look similar to signing, Cued Speech is not a sign language. Cued speech is intended to make spoken languages visually accessible to deaf people.

The system includes various handshapes and spatial locations that when combined are used to distinguish the many sounds in English that look alike. For example, the sounds made by the letters "p" and "b" look exactly the same so the hand is held in a certain form at a certain loacation when executing those phonemes so that the receiver can know, by reading the lips and observing the hand in their peripheral vision, exactly what word is being produced.

Cued speech removes the guesswork from lipreading. Research suggests that Cued Speech helps deaf people to acquire English (or other languages) naturally and to develop literacy.

External links

• Cued Language Network of America
• Testing, Evaluation, and Certification Unit (TECUnit)
• Cued Speech Discovery
• Language Matters, Inc.
• DailyCues.com
• Cued Speech Info
• Cued Speech Products
• Cuetah: Cued Speech Learning Conference