Cued speech is a visual system of communication used among the deaf people and people who are hard of hearing. It is a system of hand shapes and placements allowing spoken language to be conveyed visually. These hand shapes are known as cues, therefore the term cued speech. The movements are always near he mouth, as a suplemment to mouth reading. According to the National Cued Speech Association cued speech uses hand motions instead of mouth motions to make the phonemes of a spoken language look different. This enables people with hearing disabilities to visually approach the fundamental properties of a language. It is different from American Sign Language (ASL) because ASL is used for language development, whereas cued speech is not a language but a tool for learning a preexisting language, such as English.
Though to a hearing person, Cued Speech may look similar to signing, Cued Speech is not a sign language; nor is it a Manually Coded Sign System for a spoken language. Rather, Cued Speech is a manual modality of communication for representing any language at the phonological level (phonetics).A manual cue in cued speech consists of two components: hand shape and hand position relative to the face. Hand shapes distinguish consonants and hand positions distinguish vowel. A hand shape and a hand position together, makes up a syllable. Cuedspeech.org lists 64 different dialects that CS has been adapted to. Each language takes on CS by looking through the catalog of the language’s phonemes and distinguishing which phonemes appear similar when pronounced and thus need a hand sign to differentiate them.