Four experiments on speech reception and speech production in deaf children are reported. In study 1, conversations of seven deaf children (6 to 12 years old) were recorded and analyzed, indicating that their speech was no less intelligible than their normally hearing peers. The deaf children had received 3 or more years of parent/infant training. Study 2 demonstrated that skills acquired by 17 deaf children (10 to 17 years old) taught by cued speech did not transfer to everyday communicative speech. Study 3, involving seven pairs of profoundly hearing impaired children (5 to 7 years old) demonstrated that children taught to produce speech patterns learned more phonetic level targets than children who merely listened and discriminated speech patterns without producing them. The final study showed that cued speech is a viable method of providing deaf children with a method of effective speech reception. (CL)