THE DEAF MENTOR EXPERIMENTAL PROJECT FOR YOUNG-CHILDREN WHO ARE DEAF AND THEIR FAMILIES

The Deaf Mentor Experimental Project investigated the efficacy of deaf mentor services to young deaf children and their families. These serv ices 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 famil ies; and served as role models for the children. The children also rec eived regular home visits from a hearing parent adviser who helped. th e family promote the child's early listening, English, and literacy sk ills. The result was a bilingual-bicultural home environment for these children. The children who received deaf mentor services were compare d to matched children who did not receive these services but who recei ved parent adviser services, Children receiving this early bilingual-b icultural programming made greater language gains during treatment tim e, had considerably larger vocabularies, and scored higher on measures of communication, language, and English syntax than the matched child ren.