answer:Yes, one of the girls I went to school was born deaf, but she could talk (and do sign language). She went to a speech therapist that taught her how to read lips so she could see how the words were formed by the shape of the lips and then she was also taught how to move the air across her tongue. She could be understood fairly well, although she definitely sounded quite different than a hearing person, for the exact reason that you stated, she could never know for sure what the sounds were supposed to be like. We got a good laugh in our art class, because my friend, who could read lips quite well, had to tell our teacher that he needed to shave his beard (it was pretty bushy) so she could read his lips. She also used me as kind of a translator, because some of the time, he had to write things on the board while he was talking, and my friend could not see or hear what he was saying. The poor teacher kept forgetting that she couldn’t hear, because she could, in fact, talk. I think deaf people have varying degrees of success with spoken speech, whether they were born deaf or not.