“It has long been a belief, at least in the field of speech therapy, that sign language impedes oral language development. By showing that the majority of hearing-impaired children in the JC-SLCO program achieve satisfactory progress both on signing as well as on oral language, the project provides the first ever data-driven evidence to confirm that signing and oral language is not in a competitive relationship. By improving language processing in general, facilitation both on sign and oral language could be achieved. This is a very important message to the public as well as to the educators in the community.”