Quote:
Originally Posted by jillio
Absolutely, shel. If the child does not have a large English vocabulary, then the cuing offers only meaningless clues to phonemes. If you were to speak English, and encounter someone who, for instance, spoke Hungariean, you would be able to hear the differrent phonemes, but the sounds would be meaningless, because you are unable to grasp the concept. Likewise with a HH or deaf child that is trying to grasp conceptual meaning from English sounds that are cued. They may know that "peach" and "beach" employ different phonemes, but if they do not have the conceptual knowledge of what a peach and a beach are, the phoneme discrimination is useless.
|
This is true, as far as it goes; a family that randomly starts cueing around a deaf child is not that far different from a family that suddenly starts speaking Hungarian (to use your example) around a hearing child who doesn't speak English.
But how, then, does a hearing child gain the conceptual knowledge of what a beach and a peach are? They don't have any inherent advantage w.r.t. conceptual knowledge over a deaf child; their only advantage is that they have a tool (namely, the ability to recognize phonemes) that a deaf child does not. So, given a deaf child in the language acquisition phase, cued speech provides that tool.
Again, whether or not cued speech is the best language choice is debatable. But there is no inherent conceptual linkage - even for a hearing child - between the sound "beach" and the concept beach, or the sound "peach" and the concept peach. Language consists of a set of socialized representations of ideas, and a conceptual linkage is not required - look at all the false cognates in the world, for instance (English 'gift' versus the German 'Gift'), or the existence of constructed languages.