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Language development in deaf children is often hampered by the fact that 90 percent of these children are born into hearing families, and due to the fact that most hearing parents do not know Sign Language (SL) (Lane, Bejan, & Hoffmeister, 1996). The deaf child might be the family’s first contact with deaf people. Communication with the deaf child is only one aspect that parents need to consider, as this child will not have the same typically accessible linguistic inputs as their hearing peers. Parents will most often only use spoken language to communicate with the child. Therefore, there is no or very little language exposure (Lindfors, 1991). Many deaf children only start to learn a language, most likely a signed language or a written language, when they start attending school between the ages of three and seven. This could occur even later, depending on when the hearing loss is discovered. As a result, many deaf children have a backlog in cognitive and language development and often finds it hard to acquire a SL e.g. South African Sign Language (SASL) as well as the written form of a spoken language (e.g. English). Therefore, research has been done to determine the impact of late exposure of SL to deaf children’s language learning and development with regard to signed and written language. The assumption (hypothesis) made in this study is that it is not too late for a deaf child from hearing parents to develop basic cognitive and language skills that are on the same level than his or her hearing peers, providing that the child is exposed to language at an early age. The researcher observed and tested seven deaf children, between the ages of four and seven, at a special school for the Deaf in a rural area of South Africa. A mixed method research was used to obtain the data. Deaf learners in Grade R were observed in a classroom setting, which provided a sociolinguistic perspective to the study. Specialised tests were conducted to determine their use and understand