I'm not sure what you mean by "mind," but I think you're missing the point. The article only hinted at the implications of this, but let me make it explicit. T

I'm not sure what you mean by "mind," but I think you're missing the point. The article only hinted at the implications of this, but let me make it explicit. There is a huge distinction between the pre-lingually and post-lingually deaf. Signed and spoken languages stimulate completely different areas of the brain. So if you are delayed in acquiring a language like English you're going to have difficulty mapping between a signed and a spoken language, in grammatical terms (note this does not really affect speech/the ability to speak, since that depends more on training and residual hearing). Delayed acquisition of a spoken language is basically like learning a foreign language, except much, much harder. And this wasn't really proven definitively until fairly recently, with fMRI studies. There are some other interesting consequences for things like testing (psychometrics, etc), especially for those tests given verbally or in writing.