The Effect of Cued Speech on Phonological Awareness in Children with Educable Intellectual Disability

This research aimed to study the effect of Cued Speech teaching on raising phonological awareness in children with educable intellectual disability by studying the subunits of phonological awareness: syllable segmentation, alliteration, naming, matching the starting phonemes and phoneme deletion and rhythm. This was a quasi-experimental study with pretest-posttest study with control group. Ten children with educable intellectual disability were chosen and divided into two equally populated groups, the experimental group and the control group. The ‘1378 Solaymani Phonological Awareness Questionnaire’ was used in the beginning and at the end of the study for both groups. We held 40 sessions of Cued Speech training (90 minutes each) for the experimental group. Analysis of data with added score and t-test revealed that phonological awareness skills and its subunits including syllable segmentation and rhythm had significantly improved in the experimental group (p<0.05). However, no significant effect was observed in their alliteration. According to our results, teaching Cued Speech to children with educable intellectual disability improves their phonological skills and prevents communication problems associated with reading.