[1][5][6] However, profoundly deaf children who receive cochlear implants and auditory habilitation early in life often achieve expressive and receptive language skills within the norms of their hearing peers; age at implantation is strongly and positively correlated with speech recognition ability.
Socrates states, "Suppose that we had no voice or tongue, and wanted to communicate with one another, should we not, like the dumb, make signs with the hands and head and the rest of the body?
[13] Before this time, people with hearing loss were categorized as to be "suffering" from the disease of deafness, not under any socio-cultural categories like they are today.
Since these children were cut off from communication and knowledge, they were often forced into isolation or into work at a young age since this was the only contribution to society that they were allowed to do.
Sign language has been studied by linguists in more recent years and it is clear that even with all the variations in culture and style, they are rich in expression, grammar, and syntax.
This theory proposes that children will be able to acquire language when brought up under normal conditions and distinguish between nouns, verbs, and other functional words.
[21] Skinner theorized that when children made connections in word-meaning association, their language developed through this environment and positive-reinforcement.
[4][26][29][32] The remaining 90-95% of deaf children are born to hearing, non-signing parents/families who usually lack knowledge of signed languages.
[33] Many others choose to pursue an oral mode of communication with their children with use of technology (such as hearing aids or cochlear implants) and speech therapy.
[35] There is a wide range of ages at which deaf children exposed to a sign language and begin their acquisition process.
In Shepard-Kegl's observations at a Nicaraguan elementary school, she noted that “the younger the kids, the more fluent they were” in the developing language in this city.
The outcome of spoken language acquisition is highly variable in deaf children with hearing aids and cochlear implants.
[23] Babies need to determine what basic linguistic elements are used in their native language to create words (their phonetic inventory).
[19][40][20] They use their sensitive perceptual skills to acquire information about the structure of their native language, particularly prosodic and phonological features.
"[59] Children who focused primarily on spoken language also demonstrated greater social well-being when they did not use manual communication as a supplement.
A cochlear implant is placed surgically inside the cochlea, which is the part of the inner ear that converts sound to neural signals.
[68] While cochlear implants provide auditory stimulation, not all children succeed at acquiring spoken language completely.
[34] Though implants offer many benefits for children, including potential gains in hearing and academic achievement, they are unable to fix deafness.
It is a technique that uses handshapes near the mouth ("cues") to represent phonemes that can be challenging for some deaf or hard-of-hearing people to distinguish from one another through speechreading ("lipreading") alone.
In the United States and many other countries, the letters are indicated on one hand[83] and go back to the deaf school of the Abbe de l'Epee in Paris.
This puts deaf children at risk for serious developmental consequences such as neurological changes, gaps in socio-emotional development, delays in academic achievement, limited employment outcomes, and poor mental and physical health.
[97] There is evidence to suggest that language acquisition is a predictor of how a child's ability to develop theory of mind.
Without language acquisition, deaf children can become behind in theory of mind and the skills that coincide, which can lead to further social and emotional delays.
This mix of access to phonetic and linguistic information will shape the journey a deaf child takes to literacy.
[104] Studies have compared the eye and brain activity in equally skilled readers who are deaf and who have typical hearing.
[10] The textual information received by the eyes then travels by electrical impulses to the occipital lobe where the brain recognizes text in the visual word form area.
[10] This information is then sent to the parietal lobe which helps in reading words in the correct order horizontally and vertically, a region more heavily relied upon by skilled readers who are deaf than those who have typical hearing.
Similarly to fluent readers of the logographic writing system of Chinese, skilled readers who are deaf make use of an area in the temporal lobe in front of the visual word form area when making decisions about the meanings of words, which may represent a similarity in the visual processing of text versus phonological processing.
[10] Where as typically hearing readers rely on Broca's area and the left frontal cortex to process phonetic information during reading, skilled readers who are deaf almost solely use the inferior frontal gyrus to decode meaning rather than relying on the sounds that words would make if read aloud.
[10] Several techniques are used to help bridge the gap between signed and spoken language or the "translation process" such as sandwiching and chaining.