Misconception: CUED SPEECH IS ONLY A SPEECH TOOL.

Perhaps it is the outreach supplied by the Cued Speech community causes the misconception that Cued Speech is simply a speech tool. Some believe that cues are used solely to identify speech sounds in isolation in order to eliminate confusion: /s/ from /z/.

Although cues can be used as an effective part of speech therapy, Cued Speech is most often used in natural communication as families converse in cued English. Cueing can be produced real-time (with voice or without) and is used with and among deaf cuers.

Cued Speech can also be used as a speech tool (just as signs may be used therapeutically for children with apraxia), but this application is not the sole purpose of Cued Speech. In fact, the original intent behind the development of Cued Speech was for literacy and communication, not for speech production.

Cued Speech enables speech clinicians to model targets ("lived" /d/ from "worked" /t/), to provide immediate feedback to the child by cueing what he/she has produced. Cued Speech also gives the clinician unparalleled insight. As a student speaks and cues, the clinician is able to monitor his/her speech production (by listening) while also determining what target the child intended (by seeing the manual cues.) This gives the clinician unprecedented access into both the linguistic performance and knowledge of the child.

[NOTE: Neither the ability to produce speech nor any residual audition is required for Cued Speech. Cued Speech is a mode of communication which has numerous applications including use in speech-language therapy.]

REALITY: Cued Speech can be used to disambiguate individual speech sounds, but is more often used as a natural modality for conveying English visually.