Besides the common use of uniskript as a tool for literacy, there are anecdotical data pointing to the efficacy of uniskript in remediating reading in children with autism and dyslexia. Two cases that I want to mention are from the UofN in Kona, Hawaii. It took only two weeks for B. W. D., an autistic 21-years-old man to learn how to read and write in uniskript (C. Lima, personal communication, January 20, 2013). After that, his mother reported that he would spontaneously spend up to 5 hours per day writing texts in uniskript and that L. W. D.'s ability to read texts using Roman letters improved significantly (Suzanne Davison, personal communication, September 13, 2013).
A group of speech therapists in San Francisco area who attended to a workshop by the Uniskript Research & Literacy Institute in 2014 reported later that, by using uniskript in only one session, the patients would develop phonemic awareness equivalent to four sessions using traditional methods (Bob Norsworthy, personal communication, March 17, 2014).
M. R, a dyslexic 13-year-old girl from the International Christian School Kailua-Kona, learned the logic of uniskript letters in two weeks and then helped design the basis of the uniskript English alphabet. After many years struggling to read Roman letters, she could read uniskript with ease and even teach it to other kids. She reported later that reading in uniskript felt like finally putting on comfortable shoes (Bob Norsworthy, personal communication, March 17, 2014).
Uniskript ESL
Another proposed application of uniskript is as a tool to teach pronunciation to adult second language learners. In 2017, during the
PSLLT Conference - Bridging L2 Pronunciation Research and Teaching, and the Research Methods in Second Language Pronunciation Workshop, at the University of Utah, there was a general perception among the researchers that there is a lack of research on effective methods to teach pronunciation at the segment level. The use of IPA is usually rejected by students, who find its symbols clumsy and hard to memorize. According to
\cite{Franklin_2016} "the lack of empirical studies addressing pronunciation instruction" constitutes one of the greatest challenges reported by experts in the field of adult pronunciation.
My hypothesis is that the featural-visual indexicality and the sound-shape congruency properties of uniskript can make it a useful tool to teach methaphonological awareness in both L1 and L2.
"The term metaphonological awareness is understood by the author as consisting of the explicit knowledge of selected aspects of L2 phonetics and phonology, analytic awareness of the formal properties of the target language as contrasted with the learners’ L1 as well as a considerable level of processing control, i.e. intentional focus on phonetic forms and articulatory gestures during speech performance. In a long-term empirical study Wrembel [11] demonstrated that meta-awareness raising and conscious acquisition of explicit knowledge contributes to the development of L2 pronunciation competence more than pronunciation instruction devoid of metacognitive reinforcement." \cite{Wrembel_2010}
With the objective of illustrating the general concept of uniskript for the readers, I will introduce now the uniskript ESL alphabet. Using a one-to-one correspondence to represent the most salient phonological features of the Cot-Caught Merger dialect of American English, I will demonstrate how each one of the uniskript glyphs reflects featural-visual indexicality as well as sound-shape congruency. Uniskript ESL differs from the uniskript English alphabet used for vernacular literacy use in the way it treats the vowels.
The first distinction in the glyphs is between vowels and consonants. Vowels are generally represented by the use of lines, representing the free flowing of the air that characterizes its production. Consonants are represented by the use of a variety of plan geometric shapes, representing the organ where the occlusion occurs or the acoustic effect caused by the impediment to the air flow.