The paper reports on a study of the rate of language learning of 12 children aged 2 to 10 with severe to profound bilateral hearing losses. Intended to help deaf children learn spoken language at the same rate as average hearing Ss, the intervention stressed three qualities of linguistic information: (1) clarity, (2) appropriateness, and (3) adequate quantity. In addition, cued speech and the initiation of language teaching based on the normal developmental sequence were incorporated. Ss were divided into two groups: an oral-visual and an oral-visual plus cued speech group. Analysis of rates of progress revealed that deaf Ss learned language at or faster than the rate of hearing children on all five measures of comprehension of single word vocabulary and syntax, syntactical complexity through sentence production, and general knowledge. (CL)