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.
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.
I'm not sure how you get "millions" of CODAs from half a million deaf signers.
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.
We have a large body of hard data on the existence of Muslim-Americans, via the US Census.
Untrue. Google it.
