Table 2.

Misconceptions about the Early Adoption of a Natural Sign Language by Hearing Parents and Rebuttals to these Claims.

Misconception 1: “[T]he window for a deaf child to acquire listening and spoken language is much shorter than the window in which ASL can be acquired.” (Sugar, 2015)
Rebuttal 1	• The strongest evidence for the existence of critical periods for language development comes from deaf people learning a sign language (Mayberry & Kluender, 2018).
	• If accessible language input is delayed, subsequent development of both sign languages and spoken languages is negatively affected, demonstrating that the same critical period effects observed for spoken languages also exist for sign languages.
Misconception 2: “If you start teaching little kids sign language, it’s a visual system, and visual systems will be easier for a child to get than an auditory system...and so they’re going to get the visual and they’re not going to respond to the listening.” (Madell, 2013)
Rebuttal 2	• This perspective places the burden of accommodating others on the DHH child, who must ‘work hard’ to develop speech so that others will understand them, and it accuses the DHH child of being ‘too lazy’ to do this extra work if an ‘easier’ (more accessible) language is at hand.
	• Signing adult cochlear implant users describe “exhaustion” after prolonged use of their CI and the relief of taking it off at the end of the day. Their experiences are substantiated by neurocognitive research (White, 2019). Providing DHH children with readily accessible language input facilitates development while reducing the risk of listening and cognitive fatigue experienced by many DHH children and adults who use CIs (Spellun & Kushalnagar, 2018; Werfel & Hendricks, 2016).
Misconception 3: “Learning sign language later is always an option but learning it early destroys possibilities…it only works if children have early exposure to spoken language.” (Madell, 2017)
Rebuttal 3	• There is no evidence that early signing blocks concurrent or subsequent development of spoken language.
	• The claim that signing should only be used in conjunction with and subsequent to a spoken language reflects audist assumptions that sign languages are fundamentally inferior to spoken languages. In fact, sign languages are linguistically complex human languages, fully adequate for serving as a first and primary language.
Misconception 4: “[T]he majority of hearing parents typically lack proficiency in American Sign Language (ASL), and, therefore, cannot provide a language-rich environment in both ASL and spoken English.” (Geers et al., 2017)
Rebuttal 4	• Many hearing parents do learn enough sign for effective communication, and the benefits for their DHH children are worth the effort.
	• Parents need not be the sole sign models for their child if they seek out support from a signing community, no matter how small. Deaf adults can provide fluent sign language input to support linguistic development for the whole family, and serve as important social and cultural links to the Deaf community (Crace et al., 2020; Gale et al., 2019).