He had lagged behind his peers for a specific reason. Caselli\u2019s father, Raymond Kenney, is profoundly deaf in both ears. He was in a class for deaf and hard-of-hearing children, but they didn\u2019t teach sign language there. Instead, teachers spent years coaching him to speak using physical and visual cues. Over and over, they sounded out words like \u2018ball,\u2019 repeating \u2018bah-bah-bah\u2019 while holding his hand at their mouths to show him how to mimic the vibrations. \u201cThey really wanted him to speak,\u201d says Caselli.<\/p>\n
Raymond Kenney stands in the back row, far right, a bright adolescent in a class of elementary-age students. Kenney is deaf but had no access to sign language in school, so he had limited opportunities to advance. Photo courtesy of Naomi Caselli.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n By age eight, he knew a few basic words, but he could not speak in sentences and used made-up gestures to communicate with his family. He did learn to read, however, and excelled in math and science as a teen.<\/p>\n At age 19 at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf<\/a> at the Rochester Institute of Technology<\/a>, he got his first look at American Sign Language (ASL) in practice among other deaf students. \u201cI was enthralled,\u201d says Kenney, who immersed himself in learning the language. \u201cA lightbulb went on.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, he still struggles with reading and expressing himself in written English, frustrations that evoke his childhood, when his ability to communicate was so limited. \u201cI\u2019m still connecting to that anger,\u201d says Kenney, who is now a Certified Deaf Interpreter.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s a beautiful signer now,\u201d says Caselli, who is hearing but learned ASL alongside spoken English from birth. \u201cBut that\u2019s uncommon for people who\u2019ve had a similar experience.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, ASL has been accepted as a full-fledged language with all of the complexity, structure, syntax, and storytelling found in spoken languages. Also, elementary and secondary school programs for the deaf teach and assess ASL proficiency using accepted measurement tools, some of which were developed at BU.<\/p>\n But language deprivation remains a real problem for deaf children. \u201cKids today are still having much the same experience that my dad did,\u201d says Caselli. \u201cIt is not a thing of the past.\u201d<\/p>\n Many deaf children\u2014perhaps as many as 70 percent<\/strong>\u2014are deprived of language.<\/p>\n The concern now among researchers like Caselli and Amy Lieberman<\/a>, assistant professor of deaf studies in the BU School of Education<\/a>, is what happens before school starts. Approximately 90 to 95 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents who often don\u2019t know sign language and therefore will likely struggle to teach it before their children enter school. Even among school-aged deaf children, estimates based on data from a 2010 survey from Gallaudet University<\/a>, which specializes in deaf education, suggest that at most 40 percent of families use sign language at home. Given this data, educators in the field worry that a majority of deaf children may be deprived of language.\u00a0<\/p>\n To continue reading this story, a version of this article originally appeared on<\/i> <\/span>BU Research<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n![\"Raymond](\"http:\/\/www.bu.edu\/research\/files\/2017\/02\/raymond_kenney.jpg\")