On the nature of phonological representations and processing strategies in deaf cuers of English

Cued Speech is a manual system that visually conveys the phonology of spoken languages. When a system claims to transpose a language set into a new medium, it raises some questions regarding the interplay between language and modality. Specifically, how much of spoken phonology is internalized and produced by deaf users of Cued Speech? Are users' linguistic representations shaped by the manual modality the system utilizes? Linguistic analyses of sentences produced by deaf cuers reveal cued phonological processes that visually represent spoken phonology, yet cuers also exhibit processes influenced by manual constraints. As a result, a phonological model for cueing has been proposed to account for this dichotomy and the various phonological assimilations deaf cuers make during a sentence production task.; In addition, two psycholinguistic experiments converge on a different phonological organization for deaf cuers of English than for hearing English speakers. Using visual noise to mask the stimuli, the first experiment examines deaf cuers' perceptual organization of phonological features. Data show that deaf cuers have a different perceptual organization of consonants than hearing speakers and interactively process cued phonemes using a weighted combination of handshapes and mouthshapes. The second experiment is a production test of cuers' ability to generalize English morpho-phonological rules to pseudowords. Results show that most deaf cuers consistently affix plural forms to appropriate word-endings. However, the past tense condition distinguishes two different types of cuers based on their knowledge and use of past-tense allomorphs. Taken together, evidence from pseudowords suggests, at least for some deaf cuers, successful learning of particular stem-allomorph pairings. Since they could not have memorized pseudowords they have never encountered, deaf cuers may have implicitly learned and generalized the statistical co-occurrence of stem and allomorph sequences from common words. This dissertation confirms the notion that deaf cuers employ unique manually-constrained phonological processes to perceive, organize, and produce their linguistic representations when phonological constraints from speech articulation no longer apply.