Traditional research on the written language of hearing-impaired persons has tended to support a position of deviant language processing in such individuals. The major reason for such findings has been directly related to the lack of appropriate control groups. Recent studies which have emphasized the comparison of the language of hearing-impaired writers against normally hearing peers, rather than against an abstraction called "English," have supported the notion of linguistic delay, rather than deviancy. The latter studies, however, have placed their emphasis on syntactic consideration rather than the more promising semantic constraints. Research by this author which considered 100 syntactic and semantic aspects is congenerous with recently stated positions by Quigley and associates, namely that "deviant" and "delayed" language systems may exist side by side. Indeed, since the "deviant" rules seem consistent across large numbers of hearing-impaired writers, one could argue that these should be considered dialectal in nature, arising either from the effects of hearing impairment itself, or imposed by the educational and/or social isolation of deafness. (Author)