American Scientist

ARTICULATE: A Deaf Memoir of Voice. Rachel Kolb. 304 pp. Ecco, 2025. $23.99.

What constitutes a deaf voice? (I use the lowercase “deaf” as an inclusive term to refer to deaf people regardless of whether they identify as culturally and linguistically deaf, disabled, or both, depending on the context.) The perspectives and experiences of deaf people in the United States are complex, varied, and ever-evolving. Yet what is constant is that they navigate and negotiate a hearing-centered and speech-centered world where hearing people often falsely associate deafness “with lack, with ignorance, with loss of language,” and where signed languages are often not regarded on a par with spoken languages. The idea that deafness is associated with “loss of language” implies that deaf people cannot articulate themselves, nor can they be articulate, especially when language is narrowly equated with speech.

Rachel Kolb is no stranger to these issues. Her memoir, Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice, centers on what it means to be articulate and how she articulates herself to other people through multiple languages and modalities as a deaf signing, writing, and speaking person. Born profoundly deaf to a hearing family who decided to use both American Sign Language (ASL) and spoken English with her from the beginning, she also is part of the first generation of deaf people growing up in the United States during a period that witnessed major social, institutional, and political changes—largely due to the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) of 1990, the year Kolb was born. One outcome of the ADA is that deaf people gained legal rights to accommodations such as ASL interpreters or real-time captioning, allowing for greater participation in educational institutions. It was the ADA that allowed Kolb to mainstream in schools along with her hearing peers for most of her education, which formed the trajectory of her linguistic journey.

Braiding her personal experiences with narrative nonfiction about other deaf people throughout history and assistive technologies for hearing, Kolb illustrates what it means to articulate and to be articulate, without privileging speech and without conflating the complexity and diversity of deaf people’s backgrounds. As someone who was also born profoundly deaf to a hearing family and grew up straddling languages and worlds, the intimacy of the narrative is striking. But I was born nearly a decade earlier and did not mainstream in hearing schools until sixth grade. My parents were Taiwanese immigrants who did not speak English as their first language. They did not have access to the information about deafness that Kolb’s parents had, who then made their decision to use both ASL and English with their child at home based on the information they gathered.

“Language, by its very nature, blooms from far more varied ground—which, to me, feels like its greatest miracle.”

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The memoir is organized into 12 chapters, with each chapter delving into a particular theme that relates to some aspect of deafness, communication, and language, rooted in Kolb’s life and also the larger context of human history. Out of all the themes, the most striking ones relate to speaking, hearing, lipreading, and signing. Hearing individuals often assume that verbal speech is associated with language, and typically don’t realize the laborious training that deaf people require to learn verbal speech. Being able to speak does not mean deaf people can hear speech the same way hearing people do. Lipreading can be frustrating and ineffective, and the grammar of ASL is not simply English through the hands, but rather its own complex grammar that integrates facial expressions for distinguishing different types of sentences and modifying the meaning of signs.

Kolb challenges the narrow belief that learning to speak well amounts to being articulate or to having spoken language. Hearing people, both acquaintances and strangers alike, often applaud Kolb for the clarity of her speech, as if she “overcame” some obstacle to find her voice—a mainstream feel-good narrative of disability. But what they do not realize is that her speech is a product of 18 years of dedicated labor in speech therapy. Nor do they realize that there’s more to her experience of language than meets the ears. Kolb writes, “I feel most compelled by the immensity of language, by how we can also articulate ourselves through writing and sign language and the movements of our bodies.”

Learning to speak and becoming fluent in any spoken language comes naturally to most hearing children, who can access speech in its entirety and rely on auditory feedback to hear themselves talk. But that simply is not the case for deaf children, who must be explicitly taught to speak, with no guarantee of desired results. In recollecting her personal experiences with speech therapy, Kolb details how she labored to elucidate difficult words, and she explains the linguistics of speech sounds to show how intricate speaking actually is. Moreover, hearing families of deaf children commonly receive advice from medical professionals to use speech only. This advice positions signed language as a crutch that limits opportunities for deaf children to advance in the “real world.” If a deaf child is raised on speech only, with no exposure to signed language, the assumption is that they would learn to speak well and function better in the “hearing” world.

However, learning to sign and becoming fluent in any signed language does not require as much explicit training as speech does, since sighted deaf children can naturally access signed languages through their eyes. Deaf children do need to spend extended time with each other and learn from deaf adults as their signing models, especially if they are from hearing families and attend hearing schools. It is at deaf camp where a young Kolb receives a rare education in ASL storytelling and Deaf Culture. There, she sees how “with ASL, the body is an end in itself. The body creates its own meaning and imprints and inflects that meaning just as—I am told—the audible voice does.” She credits deaf camp for giving her the opportunity to meet “people who made my insides flare in recognition. It taught me more about myself and about ASL.” Those sentiments illustrate the beauty and importance of deaf children inhabiting a shared deaf signing space.

Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice brings up important points about linguistics, subtle ableism, and nuances of accessibility. I remain curious about how lay readers will engage with the text, especially in an unprecedented time with AI assistive technologies and increased biomedical interventions such as gene therapy. It is my hope that this book will fundamentally change how hearing readers reconceptualize language through the multilingual and multimodal lens of deaf voices that are not limited to or based on speech. More importantly, I hope readers gain a better understanding of how deaf people and their languages and cultures contribute to the biodiversity of the human species. As Kolb writes, “Language, by its very nature, blooms from far more varied ground—which, to me, feels like its greatest miracle.”