Prosody II

This is the continuation of my first post about Prosody, and why we should cue it.

To show you how so very important prosody is in communication, I’ve embedded two short videos of myself cueing several short sentences, one with prosody, one without. See which one you can get the most meaning out of:

WITHOUT PROSODY

WITH PROSODY

What were the differences?

In the second video, I used prosodic markers like longer and shorter pauses, elongated words/vowels to show stress, and body language. You could far more easily tell what the most important words were, and what meanings I meant to convey.

So, would you rather watch someone cueing with, or without prosody?

You probably said “WITH!!”
I agree. As I mentioned in my first post on this subject, watching someone who cues with almost no prosody can be boring. They also convey much less meaning. For this reason, it is important to get into the habit of cueing prosody. Especially if you’re a transliterator… Different speakers will have very different ways of using prosody.

Stay tuned for part III!

Prosody I

I’d like to take a few posts to chat about prosody. Prosody is usually something that is only really covered in intermediate to advanced cue classes. Beginner classes are (of course) concentrated around getting you to learn how to cue words with at least a modicum of accuracy and fluency. But sometimes even cueing pros become so wrapped up in whether they are cueing something accurately that they forget another very important ingredient in communication… prosody! 

What is prosody?

pro•so•dy (noun) :    the patterns of stress and intonation in a language.

What does it involve? 

With spoken language, it involves pitch, stress, and syllabic length. With cued language, there are two main components:

Facial and/or gestural indicators.

• often follow stress, voice changes, tone, rhythm, etc.
• eyebrows, shoulders, head tilts, upper body motions, are just a few of these indicators. Many people use them naturally to differing degrees when communicating.

Pauses.

• of emphasis, hesitation, or by-products of syllabics.
• think about the phrase, “That that is, is.” Where are the pauses? What happens if you leave them out?

Why should you develop cueing skills in prosody, along with accuracy and fluency? 

Prosody in spoken languages imparts a LOT of meaning and emotion. All good storytellers are pros with prosody. Recall that in this day and age of emails and IMing, people talk about how meaning (especially implied meaning) is sometimes lost when not communicating face to face or voice to voice. If prosody is not used when cueing, nor faithfully transliterated, that same loss of meaning can happen- even with the visual medium of Cued Speech providing access to words. In my opinion as a native cuer, prosody is just as important a skill to cultivate as accuracy and fluency. 

I was once subjected to a transliterated rendition of the American national anthem during a school assembly, done without an ounce of verve or vim. It was a disgrace to Francis Scott Key.

Another transliterator was a pro with prosody… she would even cue the gravelly voice of the history teacher, and her transliteration actually looked “gravelly” to me- all grindy and gray, just like the teacher’s voice sounded to her! She could pick up the moods and idiosyncrasies of teachers… sarcasm, anger, boredom, etc. and show them through her cueing. 

Some parents of hearing children like to use different voices for characters when reading to their kids. Cueing can be used in the exact same manner, with prosody!

With cued language, you have the ability to convey not only phonemes, but idiosyncrasies of language, implied meaning, and emotions. The addition of that extra layer of communication grabs more attention (helpful with easily distracted children!) and can make communication clearer.

Stay tuned for part 2, with more examples and some ideas for improving your prosodic cueing. If you have questions, please ask!

E

Texas Brings Random Contemplations on CLT Access

As I write this, I am currently in what amounts to the middle of nowhere, central Texas, working as a volunteer at an archaeological field school, ready to sell a kingdom for a good hot biscuit, and surrounded by colonies of fire ants. I also have very limited internet, so y’all are very lucky to get this post from me.

Besides hot biscuits, I am also without a cued language transliterator. This was mainly by choice. A choice which reminds me everyday of how lucky I was to have transliterators all through public school and college. I even had a CLT for the first field school I completed 3 years ago in Virginia! So, why go without? I thought of it as a field test of sorts, you see, an experiment from which I could learn how working with a team on a long-term project (2 months in this case) sans cued speech might function. Unlike some other deaf cuer peers, I do not use my cochlear implant as much, nor nearly as well, so CLTs (and other accommodations like CART and/or c-print) are still important for me at times. However, I have no illusions I will get regular access to a CLT as an archaeologist due to small budgets, long trips and field situations normal mortals including transliterators, (i.e. non-archaeologists), would not willingly go through, so I thought it prudent to find a somewhat controlled environment (e.g. a field school) and work out my weaknesses while getting more practical experience in my field. 

So far, it’s as I expected, hot, dry, no running water, long working hours, endless strings of blabbity-blab mouths moving. None of the students have heard of cued speech of course, but I still wear my sun-color changing cue-wheel shirt to work at the ranch where our site is. I do miss the clarity of cued speech, oh yeah… Lots of errors flying ’round! The other day while returning to home base from the site, we got stopped by a long procession of emergency vehicles from various county and city departments. When our driver explained that “someone in emergency services died, and this is a funeral procession,” my brain’s “lipreading processing center” sent impulses from the wrong directory, and I read the last two words as ‘federal possession.’ Puzzled, I watched all the ambulances, police cruisers, and fire trucks pass, trying to figure out just how the Liberty Hill city FD and Williamston county PD counted as FBI, and who this one person was who’d died and made it necessary for the Feds to step in! 

Despite being without a CLT for now, I am very thankful I had good luck with access to transliterators for academic settings. I’ve found find them to be far superior to transcriptionists and other accommodations. Without them, I wouldn’t have gotten where I am now- able to contemplate going into archaeology! I am also thankful the transliterators I had were in the main, very, very durable, because I was very ambitious in my class choices. Earlier I mentioned a CLT who worked with me in Virginia at a field school- the lady drove for 2 hours a day from Charlottesville to be there to cue 8 hours, 5 days a week, mostly spent outdoors in western Virginian heat and humidity, next to an excavation site (or what would amount to a ‘dirt pit’ for most people). Hats off to her. Three different transliterators were also subjected to three different language classes, and none knew the languages they were trying to cue, but they pulled through. College classes, especially the labs, must have been a literal pain, because I usually only had one CLT, not the two that are now ideally recommended for long lecture situations. So, here’s a big thank you to all transliterators, not just the ones who cued for me! Here’s hoping many others will have the same good fortune and choices I did with CLT access.