Logan Alva

Math 1030-001
4/25/2016
Statistics for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing: Manual vs. Oral
Introduction
According to John Vickrey Van Cleve and Barry A. Crouch, authors of A Place of Their
Own: Creating the Deaf Community in America, there has been a great debate since the early
nineteenth century. An argument of how the people we now call deaf and hard of hearing
should be raised. The two main movements were the oral method and the manual method.
Oralists fought for deaf people to be raised purely with spoken language. Advocates of the
manual method fought for deaf people to be raised learning both American Sign Language (ASL)
and English.
I will be exploring the statistics we have now, some two hundred years later, about
these two different methods and their effects. The purpose of this paper is to show the results
of my research and comparison of statistics to inform the public. My hypothesis is the numbers
between oral and manual method will be similar since they are still both practiced. I plan to
approach this through online research and consulting a professor of Deaf Culture.

The Numbers
I have found that finding numbers on this topic are difficult and scarce. According to
Carol Padden and Tom Humphries, authors of Inside Deaf Culture, American Sign Language was
only recognized as a language in academic circles after the 1960s. This contributes to the lack
of research on this topic. Another problem is defining someone as deaf or hard of hearing.
To understand this you have to understand that sound is measured on two different scales: the
pitch and the loudness measured in frequency and decibels respectively. Some people have

Logan Alva
Math 1030-001
4/25/2016
profound loss of hearing high pitch sounds where other people have profound loss of hearing
low decibel sounds or quiet sounds. On top of all this the census hasnt counted the deaf
population since 1930, according to Gallaudet University. The only numbers that exist now are
estimates. So its hard to find out how many deaf people are raised with each method or the
effects of these different methods.
But Gallaudet estimates deaf population is 4,057,664 people. The National Institute of
Health reports two to three out of a thousand children born in the United States of America are
born with disabling or severe hearing loss. Approximately three million children in the United
States of America having a hearing loss. According to the Center for Hearing and
Communication, mild hearing loss can cause a child to miss as much as 50% of classroom
discussion. Blossom Montessons School for the Deaf reports the eighty-three out of every
thousand children in the United States have what is termed as educationally significant hearing
loss. It is the number one reported birth defect in the United States.
Continuing with those numbers from Blossom Montessons School for the Deaf are what
this mean in society are as follows. 75-85% of deaf high school students only read at a 3rd to 4th
grade level. Deafness is thus the most costly single disability. Specialized education cost
averages $25,000 per year per child compared to $5,100 for a hearing child. The average
lifetime cost to society of a child born deaf in terms of medical, educational and productivity
losses is $1,020,000. Gallaudet University estimates 2,056,658 of the total deaf population are
employed. Thats 49.3% unemployed. The National Council on the Aging, Data from the
Consequences of Untreated Hearing Loss in Older Persons concluded that hearing loss
contributed to a older Americans feelings of isolationism and depression.

Logan Alva
Math 1030-001
4/25/2016
Finding these numbers was easy. Trying to find which method is the cause for these
loses to society was a little more difficult but the Gallaudet University had an interesting article
that helped greatly. According to The Buff and Blue 95% of deaf babies are born to hearing
parents. 90% of those parents choose the oral method. But just because most deaf people are
raised oral doesnt automatically mean we can draw the conclusion that the manual method
would yield lower numbers in negative effects on society.
I decided to research lip reading, now more often referred to as speech reading, and its
statistics. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America did a study on this very subject. In
their test group of eighty-four college students, not a single one got above 30% accuracy. The
mean of the data collected was 12.4% with a standard deviation of 6.67%.
Blossom Monessons School for the Deaf reports that the best of lip readers under the
best of circumstances have 30-40% accuracy. Thats three to five standard deviations above
the mean but still missing more than half the conversation. This might be a reasonable
explanation to why less than 25% of deaf high school students can read above a fourth grade
level as well as all the other costs on society.
The Buff and Blue cited several scientific articles in their article titled AG Bell President
Sugar, youre not so sweet. Included are studies that demonstrate that children with hearing
implants such as cochlear implants and raised orally do not test on par with hearing peers, but
second generation deaf children raised with American Sign Language at home and English in
school showed improvement in their use of cochlear implants. Further cited are studies on how
learning these two languages vs just English increases the abilities of the brain.

Logan Alva
Math 1030-001
4/25/2016
Conclusion
Deaf and Hard of Hearing children are most commonly raised in the oral method by a
huge difference. This method seems to yield less able people to society as far as the data
availed at this time shows. This is a surprising contrast to my hypothesis. The professor of Deaf
culture, David Davenport at Salt Lake Community College, I consulted with and got some of my
research sources from is deaf himself. Many of his coworkers are deaf as well. They report
different stories of being raised to different degrees in each method, but all of these employed
college graduates in the end switched over to the manual method. Overall that shows to be the
more effective method as far as statistical information shows at this point in time.