Bookworm

Here's a great website which looks through all of the articles in the pre-print service arXiv where you can compare term usage seen in articles as it search for trends in hundreds of thousands of scientific articles. The trend I looked for are "cochlear implant," "hearing aids," "sign language," "cued speech," and "deaf education."

Here are the results:

As you can see since 2011 the number of articles on sign language has dropped dramatically while cued speech, deaf education, cochlear implant and hearing aids jumped up dramatically. For a better up close graph result go here.

For sign language it has peaked twice around 2010 and mid-2011 but it appears to be waning while deaf education, cued speech, cochlear implant and hearing aids appear to be over taking sign language.

What can we infer from all of this is anybody's guess. Perhaps over the next 5 to 10 years we will probably get a better sense of the on going trend. Although in Google Trends it shows that the term "sign language" is on the downward trend which seems to corroborate the Book worm search while other terms in Google Trends appear to be relatively static.

UPDATE: I also looked separately on trends in Google Books Ngram. For books that discuss sign language from 1880 to 2008 you can see it peaked around 1998 and has been going down ever since.  On cochlear implant it peaked around 2002. On hearing aids it peaked in 2000. On deaf education it peaked around 1995.  And on cued speech it peaked around 1997.