Hard of hearing or profoundly deaf people make use of cued speech (CS) as a communication tool to understand spoken language. By delivering cues that are relevant to the phonetic information, CS offers a way to enhance lipreading. In literature, there have been several studies on the dynamics between the hand and the lips in the context of human production. This article proposes a way to investigate how a neural network learns this relation for a single speaker while performing a recognition task using attention mechanisms. Further, an analysis of the learnt dynamics is utilized to establish the relationship between the two modalities and extract automatic segments. For the purpose of this study, a new dataset has been recorded for French CS. Along with the release of this dataset, a benchmark will be reported for word-level recognition, a novelty in the automatic recognition of French CS.

Cued Speech (CS) is a multi-modal visual coding system combining lip reading with several hand cues at the phonetic level to make the spoken language visible to the hearing impaired. Previous studies solved asynchronous problems between lip and hand movements by a cuer\footnote{The people who perform Cued Speech are called the cuer.}-dependent piecewise linear model for English and French CS. In this work, we innovatively propose three statistical measure on the lip stream to build an interpretable and generalizable model for predicting hand preceding time (HPT), which achieves cuer-independent by a proper normalization. Particularly, we build the first Mandarin CS corpus comprising annotated videos from five speakers including three normal and two hearing impaired individuals. Consequently, we show that the hand preceding phenomenon exists in Mandarin CS production with significant differences between normal and hearing impaired people. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our model outperforms the baseline and the previous state-of-the-art methods.