Originally Posted by MegMeg
Dude, I'm not sure what the rest of your point is, but I can address this:
Originally Posted by Dude
Originally Posted by MegMeg
Hearing kids who grow up in deaf signing households learn the spoken language of the surrounding community with no problem.
Citation? I think it would be hard to find rigorous studies on families where all adult members of the household are deaf, because how many are there?

Reliable numbers of deaf signers in the U.S. are hard to come by, but estimates are around .5 million. Most of them marry other fluent signers. And ninety percent of their children have normal hearing. So how many CODAs (children of deaf adults) are there? Probably millions.

Some do need a bit of speech therapy, if they don't have much interaction with the hearing community in their early years, but they catch up quickly when they hit school age. But most pick up speech very early from hearing relatives, friends, babysitters, neighbors, etc., in the same way that immigrant children pick up English even if their parents don't speak it.

Sorry I don't have a citation, but citing this is a bit like providing a citation that Muslim-Americans exist. (Actually a very apt comparison, since there's a similar lack of hard data, but nobody doubts that a substantial population exists.) A bit of googling will back up my claims.

Here's a good intro to just how normal (and fluently bilingual) CODAs are: CODA Brothers

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.