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From http://www.wbur.org/edify/2018/07/23/deaf-students-language-deprivation

How Educators Are Trying To Overcome 'Language Deprivation' For Deaf Kids
By Carrie Jung
July 23, 2018

Jen Foundas learned her son William was deaf when he was 6 weeks old.

"It was not what I expected," she says.

Foundas remembers the audiologist was quick to follow up, telling her that everything was going to be fine, but telling her, "you need to learn American Sign Language."

...According to the National Institutes of Health, more than 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents like the Foundas family. But for a variety of reasons — from access to resources to outdated medical advice — a majority of those parents don’t follow Foundas’ same path. They either don’t learn sign language at all, or they don’t know enough ASL to sign to their kids in a meaningful way.

"They’re not included in conversation and they’re not able to process and experience and make use of language," says Patrick Rosenburg, a researcher working with the Language Acquisition and Visual Attention Lab at Boston University. Through an ASL interpreter, he explains that deaf children are not automatically exposed to language in the same way that hearing kids are. And without access to a meaningful amount of language in the early years, kids can suffer from “language deprivation."

Read the full article at http://www.wbur.org/edify/2018/07/23/deaf-students-language-deprivation