I think the true answer is not impossibility, but significant, near insurmountable difficulty. The sound processing is not hooked up to cognition in the way it

I think the true answer is not impossibility, but significant, near insurmountable difficulty. The sound processing is not hooked up to cognition in the way it would be in a brain that had always had sensory input from the ears. Aissam would first need to learn to differentiate tones, voices, mouth-sounds, consonants vs vowels, etc. That's a lot to ask of a brain that had no understanding of that form of input at all. But all of this may turn out to be untrue! Our understanding of language acquisition comes from Feral Children[1], who had no language understanding at all, but could hear. Aissam has language skills, though developed late - The article mentions he started learning Spanish Sign Language at 8 years old. That's already a remarkable feat. This might overturn our views of language acquisition, which were mostly formed in the 1800's; Pedagogy has come a long way since then. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition#As_a_typically_human_phenomenon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_acquisition#As_a_typi...