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 [...]

Learning Language

“Imagine, if you will, a family that has just had a new baby. These new parents never talk to the baby and somehow manage to keep the baby from most conversation until he is about two years old. At two, they decide it is the correct time for baby to begin to talk. Each day, [...]

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 [...]

One Note at a Time

Imagine that you are a professional musician working every day and never playing the same piece of music twice.  Each evening you show up at the auditorium in your black tux and on a screen, you are shown only one note at a time, in rapid succession, not a standard piece of music with the [...]

More Cued Speech Informational Videos

There are actually a total of five video segments which the National Cued Speech Association has made available.  This one is the longest.  It’s called Who Uses Cued Speech?  The video shows both native cuers and hearing parents describe how and why they chose Cued Speech as the primary communication modality for their child/children.  I’m [...]

Cued Children’s Stories

The National Cued Speech Association has recently published, on YouTube, a series of new videos on Cued Speech.  They did a really good job!  The videos include captions for those who cannot hear the audio or read the cues.  This one is entitled Cued Children’s Stories and it includes the cued versions of several familiar [...]

Smarter Than a 5th Grader?!?

What I really love about September is that none of the erasers have been chewed off the pencils.  Yet.
The last blog that I wrote has a comment from Esther asking if I have cued in all of the grades yet.  That’s funny because my colleagues joke that we should, by now, be smarter than 5th [...]

The Middle Man

It’s a cool job.  I go places.  I learn things.  I sing and crack jokes.  Sometimes I flirt or tell a lie.  I’ve gone down a zip wire and had to kiss a fish.  I am a professional communication facilitator, aka, Cued Language Transliterator. The clients’ lives are private, so the window that I have [...]

Connections Within the Family

To come from a family where each of my immediate family members learned how to cue is something I consider a blessing. I even put my life on the line by trying to teach the family cat how to expressively cue to me. I would take her paw and try to move it around her [...]

Giving Back: Ten Years Later

Ten years ago, I was asked to meet a family with a daughter who had been diagnosed with a profound bilateral hearing loss. This was a first for me. By no means did I know what the role of a deaf model meant. After all, I grew up in a rural town 20 miles north [...]