“For most of these families, their children’s birth is the first time they’ve met anybody deaf. So they go to the early intervention system, which focuses on what they call ‘communication’ — meaning, being able to speak,” Wyatte Hall, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Rochester Medical Center’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, said through an interpreter. “But ‘communication’ is usually secondary to having language, and language is what is necessary for true cognitive development.”