Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional Gifted and Speech Delayed?

Yes, hearing children of completely deaf parents develop normal speech. Some of that is probably because they also have peers in school, etc. who interact with them.
Before hearing aids, cochlear implants, etc., the average person who was born completely deaf only reached a third grade reading level. That is because you need to exercise and develop the auditory part of the brain- if you can't, that part of the brain "dies off" (think of auditory processing disorder). The brain operates on a "use it or lose it" type of principle!
I would never sit on speech delay. I have said this over and over- hearing loss in children can be very subtle and easy to miss. My son had three normal hearing screens (three years in a row) at hte pediatrician's before I got an audiology exam and learned that he is almost deaf in one ear.
My son has always been extremely verbal and articulate. He has never had a speech delay, FWIW.

If there's a deaf adult and a hearing adult in the family, and the hearing adult insists that the child must speak, then the child will develop speech. That's why my question was limited to households where all adults are deaf, because that's the nearest analog to what we're talking about here.

I'm not sure how you get "millions" of CODAs from half a million deaf signers. The math doesn't work. They'd have to marry and proliferate at a significantly higher rate than the hearing population.

We have a large body of hard data on the existence of Muslim-Americans, via the US Census.

Again, I'm not really following you. The OP was about a hearing household where the child is getting a ton of incidental exposure to speech. Furthermore, most deaf signers DO marry other deaf signers. Those that don't, tend to marry hearing fluent signers (for example, CODAs), and most of the communication in the household is still in ASL. In fact the hearing parent often makes a deliberate effort to only sign with the hearing child(ren), because otherwise they (the children) will push things towards spoken communication and lose their fluency in ASL (the same thing that tends to happen to immigrant children).

The ONLY thing I'm trying to address here is your claim that children won't acquire a language unless they're forced to "work" at it. This is counter to everything we know about language acquisition.

You're right, I was doing hasty math (getting contaminated by other stats floating around in my brain that aren't relevant here). Let's revise that to ~.5 million CODAs, roughly replacement rate. I don't believe this changes anything about my point.

Untrue. Google it.

I actually need to step in here with a slight correction. The 3rd-grade reading level thing is due to language deprivation in childhood, not auditory deprivation. It was the result of a century of oral-only dogma in deaf schools. The deaf kids who have the HIGHEST English reading and writing skills (often college-level or higher) are . . . deaf children of deaf signing parents. The kids who get full exposure to a natural language from birth.

I agree. Language acquisition is too important, and it has a window.

All of this is argument by assertion.

Untrue. Google it. [/quote]

Okay.

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0075.pdf

Technically not of US Census origin, but they're providing it, and it still qualifies as a large body of hard data. 200,000+ interviews is pretty solid.

Even though this thread went kind of off-track, I'm going to keep it updated (if only for the fact that lurkers will probably search and find it if they need it.)

DD qualified for speech therapy with the early intervention program. Right after we went to the appt, we went and got her tongue tie and lip tie clipped and she now has much better mobility with her tongue. The posterior tongue tie apparently caused an underbite. She's still not talking very much, but it's only been a week, so we'll see.

Yay for progress!

A friend on fb feed posted pics of her daughter's lip tie a few months ago and I began researching and discovered DD had lip tie and posterior tongue tie. I was lucky to have a local dentist who regularly sees them and fixes them with a laser, so we took her to him. He was able to diagnose officially and fix them both.

She's actually trying to copy more of our words this week, so we'll see where it goes from here.


ETA 2014 - if anyone finds this thread with the same questions -- she had a speech therapist after this, but she didn't need it. As soon as we fixed the lip and tongue ties she started talking. She's talking in very long sentences / paragraphs now at 3.5.