Hearing loss limits deaf children's access to spoken languages, but deaf communities around the world acquire natural sign languages that create complete communication systems with the same subtlety and level of syntactic and semantic complexity as any spoken language. At the core of these communities are the 8%–10% of deaf children with deaf parents who are exposed to sign language from birth. But some deaf children with hearing parents are also exposed to a natural sign language through contact with native-signing deaf children and adults in educational settings. Thus, deaf children may be speech-delayed, but they are not necessarily language-delayed or disordered in any sense.