R. Orin Cornett
| R. Orin Cornett | |
|---|---|
| Born | Richard Orin Cornett November 13, 1913 Driftwood, Oklahoma United States |
| Died | December 7, 2002 (aged 89) Laurel, Maryland United States |
| Residence | Laurel, Maryland |
| Nationality | American |
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| Institutions | |
| Alma mater |
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| Thesis | Acoustic Spectra of Edge Tones |
| Known for | Cued Speech |
| Spouse | Lorene |
| Children | Robert, Stanley, and Linda |
R. Orin Cornett (November 13, 1913 – December 7, 2002) was an American physicist, university professor and administrator, and the inventor of a literacy system for the deaf, known as Cued Speech.
R. (Richard) Orin Cornett was born in Driftwood, Oklahoma, a now unincorporated town near the Kansas border located in Alfalfa County, on November 14, 1913. He earned his BS degree in Mathematics from Oklahoma Baptist University in 1934, followed by an MS from the University of Oklahoma in 1937. In 1940, Cornett was awarded a Ph.D. in physics and applied mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin, with his thesis entitled, “Acoustic Spectra of Edge Tones.” From 1935 to 1945, Dr. Cornett taught physics, mathematics, and electronics at Oklahoma Baptist, Penn State, and Harvard Universities.
In 1959, Cornett became the Director of the Division of Higher Education at the U.S. Office of Education. While in that position, upon the review of funding for Gallaudet College (present-day Gallaudet University), he was appalled to discover that most deaf persons had below grade level reading skills and fail to achieve literacy at a native-level. In 1965, Cornett accepted a position as the Vice President of Long-Range Planning at Gallaudet. While serving there, he devised a phonemic system which rendered the English language visually, rather than acoustically, to address the issue of deaf literacy. He called this novel system Cued Speech.
The invention of Cued Speech in 1966 opened a new field within deaf education. His Cued Speech system was based on the hypothesis that if all the sounds in the spoken language could clearly be made to look different from each other coming from the lips of the speaker, those who were hearing impaired would learn a language in much the same way as a hearing person, but through the use of their vision rather than acoustically. Of the system, Cornett stated, "A few months of study convinced me that the underlying cause of their (deaf persons) reading problem was the lack of any reasonable way to learn spoken language, without which they could not use speech for communication, become good lipreaders, or learn to read (as opposed to being taught the recognition of each written word). So, I really started with the conclusion that what was needed was a convenient way to represent the spoken language accurately, through vision, in real time. That was the problem I set out to solve, the perceived need that set my direction.”
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