Temporal measures of hand and speech coordination during French Cued Speech production.

International audienceCued Speech is an efficient method that allows orally educated deaf people to perceive a complete oral message through the visual channel. Using this system, speakers can clarify what they say with the complement of hand cues near the face; similar lip shapes are disambiguated by the addition of a manual cue. In this context, Cued Speech represents a unique system that closely links hand movements and speech since it is based on spoken language. In a previous study, we investigated the temporal organization of French Cued Speech production for a single cueing talker. A specific pattern of coordination was found: the hand anticipates the lips and speech sounds. In the present study, we investigated the cueing behavior of three additional professional cueing talkers. The same pattern of hand cues anticipation was found. Results are discussed with respect to inter-subject variability. A general pattern of coordination is proposed

Acoustic and auditory phonetics: the adaptive design of speech sound systems

Speech perception is remarkably robust. This paper examines how acoustic and auditory properties of vowels and consonants help to ensure intelligibility. First, the source–filter theory of speech production is briefly described, and the relationship between vocal-tract properties and formant patterns is demonstrated for some commonly occurring vowels. Next, two accounts of the structure of preferred sound inventories, quantal theory and dispersion theory, are described and some of their limitations are noted. Finally, it is suggested that certain aspects of quantal and dispersion theories can be unified in a principled way so as to achieve reasonable predictive accuracy