"The learning potential of a deaf child is tremendously high. We mustn't lower our expectations"

The first thing they must do is contact the relevant services. There are many professionals dedicated to treating children with this type of impairment - speech therapists, psychologists, ENT specialists - and it is important that they take charge of the situation as early as possible. But the family also needs to bear in mind the need for changes in their home for the first few years to make communication easier, as well as considering the emotional strain of the situation. They will need help, because for a family, the birth of a child with hearing impairment is traumatic, it can feel like a disappointment ... The main thing is to think about communication in general, more than the specific form. It isn't wise to wait and see which form of communication the child takes to more readily because every month that passes is time lost in that child's development. For children with severe hearing impairment it's easier to prioritize work with sign language initially, as well as some work with a speech therapist for spoken language, so that the child gradually develops a vocabulary in both forms for communicating with the parents and expressing emptions. With time, depending on the child's capabilities, it will become clearer whether they are gaining fluency in the use of words and improving their spoken language. The crucial thing is to avoid competition between spoken language and sign language, as the two can actually complement one another and should be given the same importance, so that if one fails there is always a "plan B". It varies, as with hearing children. They don't all perform equally and in many cases their abilities are linked to the origins of the hearing impairment. The condition may be caused by a disease, like meningitis, that also has cognitive effects, on memory, attention... If the impairment has a different cause and we ask the same of deaf children as we would of a hearing child, they can go on to have the same success. We shouldn't forget that the world is pure sound, and it's a different environment for them, but the learning potential of a deaf child is tremendously high. We mustn't lower our expectations. This is a complicated and controversial issue. I'm inclined to think that if they are well supported and a solid system is in place then things can work very well. I've just written the chapter of an essay on bilingual education in four schools in Madrid that teach deaf and hearing children together, where teachers go to tremendous lengths to design a curriculum and a range of activities that allow deaf and hearing children to work together. And it works. The most positive thing is to have parents who understand their point of view. For parents with no hearing impairment it's important to get in touch with deaf adults, to find out what their school experience was like, how they learned to read, to write... Hearing parents of deaf children always need some form of contact with the deaf community to help them understand these experiences, although I recognize that this interaction isn't always easy. One of the major problems society has in dealing with hearing impairment is to treat it as a purely medical issue rather than considering the cultural or linguistic implications. There are a number of cross-overs. Children with hearing impairment have extremely diverse inputs in terms of quality, quantity and context. The study of language acquisition reveals that children with hearing impairment have strong skills and tells us a lot about the impact of language on cognitive functions. Many children with hearing impairment are actually very competent linguistically, and there is a lot to learn from the influence of language on cognition: which are the most redundant areas of language, for example, and which are the most significant... In my work group I need sign language for day-to-day communication with a number of colleagues. At the beginning of my research career I had to visit a lot of families affected by hearing impairment to evaluate their cases and it was absolutely vital to be able to communicate with them in sign language, which took me some ten years to learn properly. I believe so, yes. I'll give you an example. In English we don't use the subjunctive tense like you would in Spanish, yet we find a way to describe the hypothetical, the abstract. Sign language has a great many nuances that enrich our thought. I was studying the development of a language, not in children specifically but in the community as a whole. I studied the evolution of a language created in 1979 and saw how it had affected the community, how the children had contributed to its development. The film Una vida sin palabras, which came out in 2011, deals with the same topic. I see it as similar to the way in which a Portuguese speaker can communicate with a Catalan, or an Italian speaker with a Spaniard. Sign languages are different and have different words, but they are like a family of languages with common visual and iconic roots. They aren't universal, but a deaf Japanese person, for example, can sign with a deaf English person and establish an excellent understanding, which would be impossible between Japanese and English speakers who have no knowledge of each other's languages. Researchers are great fans of compartmentalizing and drawing lines between populations, and they aren't very flexible because the populations are extremely varied - there isn't much different between a disorder and impairment. There's a certain amount of tension between research and intervention because there are no pure cases. We have parameters, but not everyone fits into them. At the symposium I explained the dangers of a child being denied welfare support simply because he or she is not considered autistic, despite exhibiting a number of characteristic signs. Social services want an exact diagnosis before they will act; a word that denotes exactly what disorder the child is suffering from. There have been fascinating steps forward thanks to the Internet, video technologies and social networks like Twitter. Tools like these make it far easier to communicate and to participate in community life.