Centre for Students with Disabilities div. Some Popular Myths 1. Deafness leads automatically to muteness or an inability to speak.
Most deaf people can learn to understand and speak a language at least to some modest degree.
Deafness is, however, a barrier to normal language development. Teaching sign language to deaf persons will retard their development of normal language. There is a general agreement among educators today that a combination of manual and oral methods, adjusted to the individual's needs, is an effective way to teach people who are deaf or hard of hearing to communicate. The teaching of sign language does not retard the language development but provides an alternative to spoken language. Hearing aids are useless to people with sensorineural hearing loss.