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Abstract
In this chapter it is argued that a purely visual phonology might be conceived which is in principle accessible to profoundly deaf children. Empirical evidence is examined aimed at establishing whether visual phonology fulfills all of the functions it does in hearing persons. Numerous experiments have shown that lipreading provides useful phonological information to both deaf and hearing persons. However, it is intrinsically ambiguous, this is why its contribution to speech processing and representation, despite its importance in deaf children, remains insuficiente. The role of the Langage Parlé Complété (LPC), the French version of Cued Speech, is considered in this context. The empirical evidence examined in some detail shows that LPC improves considerably performance in sentences, words and pseudo words processing. This makes possible the development of aspects of linguistic ability particularly difficult for deaf children (i.e. the morphophonology of gramatical genre and the use of prepositions). It is also shown that deaf children do use phonological representations in short term memory, and reach high level scores in metaphonological ability tasks (rime decision), reading and writing. Finnaly it is shown that all of the deaf children substantially benefit from LPC, however the results were exceptionally good when they were exposed to it at their homes from na early age.
Key-words
Deaf, phonology, lip-reading, Langage Parlé Compété (LPC), Cued-Speech (CS), reading, writting, rhiming, phonological processing, phonological representation.
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