BTW, if a kids not talking when they're 3 or 4, something's wrong.
I used to think not, operating under the assumption that since sound is pretty much irrelevant to deaf children, all it might mean is.....deafness, no accompanying mental or emotional problems.
Much to my surprise, as an adult I learned that I myself had been talking since circa two years of age, apparently a really lively "chatterbox."
Of course, what I said made no sense, but apparently it was "talking" nonetheless; my younger brother and one older sister were imaginative enough to figure out the "language," and by the time I went to kindergarten, while there were some problems of varying severity, there were fewer problems than one might expect.
It might seem odd, but perhaps hearing and speaking are not related.
It is best of course to use them together, but they might be unrelated with each other.
It was in the early 1990s that two otolaryntologists gave me their professional opinion and observations that deaf children, like hearing children, should be yimmer-yammering away by 2 or 3 years of age (even if not in English), and if they aren't, it's symptomatic of some sort of serious mental condition.
