One discrepancy in Chapter 6

Hey everyone -

I read through chapter six this afternoon and thought it did a pretty good job of presenting a very complicated topic (deaf children in family structures). However, there was one statement that felt a little funny to me:

"It is only natural for parents to think that the basic problem fo the deaf child is an inability to speak, when in reality it is an inability to hear" (149).

I realize that the point the text is trying to make is that ultimately, a deaf child's difficulty originates with a lack of sound input, but I think that the primary struggle that deaf individuals face with the general public is the stigma related to their voice. I even had one man bluntly tell me that he "just couldn't handle" how "weird" deaf people sound, and therefore avoids them, after telling him about my future career in interpreting. I don't think that hearing people (who do not have background information in deafness) automatically look down on those who cannot hear... they tend to look down on people who cannot speak well. An example of this is those individuals who are late deafened: their hearing might be shot, but their voice is in tact, and others do not assume a lesser intellect because of it. This stereotype of intellect = verbal communication is rampant throughout America, not only for those with the "deaf accent", but accents in general, even good ol' southern accents. In standardized English that is considered academic, little else is accepted. Dialect, vernacular, pronunciation... these things have come to equal cognitive ability in the grand scheme of our society.

It seems like this paradox (the truth that many people are judged based on how people hear them, rather than whether or not they hear others) would also play into the complications regarding oral/manual communication. The issue is not as much whether deaf individuals *can* speak, but how WELL they will speak - how native it sounds. Could it be that we sometimes misunderstand the actual mechanisms of speech that allow people to truly be accepted by the majority? That the presence of speech does not eliminate the struggle for acceptance?

I truly want to know what everyone thinks about this and I think this is a great way that our different specialties (interpreting, speech path, audiology, deaf ed, etc) can really work together to change minds regarding the verbal aspect of deafness.

Thoughts?