Most people remembered the deaf as being far more positive about their inability to hear. :I know that I asked him once, I never forgot it, because, well, because it was typical of him. I said, ‘Have you ever felt you missed anything important in life because you couldn't speak or hear?' And he said ‘No. I have never had to listen to anything unpleasant.'"
The Islanders learned sign language in childhood. When I asked informants how either hearing or deaf children learned to sign, there was general consensus that the growing child learned the language as naturally as he would learn English. Children growing up in households with deaf members " just picked up the language," many people told me. As the daughter of one deaf woman said "I never given much thought of that. It came naturally," One elderly man recalled that his hearing cousin, daughter of a deaf father and hearing mother, acquired the use of signs even earlier than speech. "She could talk deaf and dumb with her fingers earlier than she could speak. I've often heard that it started off with her when she was young... I know they used to say that she had talked with [her father] earlier than she could talk with her hearing mother."
Research has shown that deaf children exposed to sign language in infancy will begin to sign at least as early as hearing children begin to speak. Some research indicates that the ability to sign may in fact precede the ability to speak by several months.(2) The rate at which deaf children acquire a vocabulary, if they are signers , is virtually identical to the rate of hearing children, and by the age of five or so, both have acquired vocabularies of over 1,000 words. In contrast, a deaf child who is given oral instruction and is not exposed to sign language often has a functional vocabulary of only several dozen words by the age of five. The acquisition of sign language and English by hearing children of deaf parents has been studied, and it has been found that both languages are easily acquired simultaneously (Prinz and Prinz 1979, 1981).
Those who knew the language were expected to know it well, and pretending ignorance, even by children, was not tolerated. "Sarah, who was deaf and dumb, you know, used to babysit for our daughter, and Sarah would tell our daughter to do something. And May, our daughter would pretend that she didn't understand the signs. And would that make Sarah mad! Boy, she'd stamp her foot, and she'd yell.
What's wrong with how I say what I mean? It's not like I'm insulting the hearing people, Geeze. Don't need to shout at me, Take a huge chill pill, Would you?
Also I like to add this book again that are into a Diverse world for Deaf and Hearing people to be together. It is already proven that it had been done it already before ORALISM took over. So there!
