The Deaf Mentor Experimental Project for Young Children Who Are Deaf and Their Families

Abstract

The Deaf Mentor Experimental Project investigated the efficacy of deaf mentor services to young deaf children and their families. These services focused on deaf adults (mentors), who made regular home visits to the children and their families; shared their language (American Sign Language), culture, and personal knowledge of deafness with the families; and served as role models for the children. The children also received regular home visits from a hearing parent adviser who helped the family promote the child's early listening, English, and literacy skills. The result was a bilingual-bicultural home environment for these children. The children who received deaf mentor services were compared to matched children who did not receive these services but who received parent adviser services. Children receiving this early bilingual-bicultural programming made greater language gains during treatment time, had considerably larger vocabularies, and scored higher on measures of communication, language, and English syntax than the matched children.