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.

Since little information is available on the outcome of early hearing intervention programs in South Africa, this article examines data on infants and families registered with a family-centred, home-based intervention program (HI HOPES) over a 12-month period in order to track the effectiveness of the holistic unbiased support to families of infants and toddlers with a hearing-loss. The aim of HI HOPES, which is based on the SKI-HI model of early intervention in the USA, is to ensure that families are enabled to make informed choices for their unique infant. Data were gathered on 32 infants ages birth to three years and their families using both qualitative and quantitative measures which included analysis of demographic data, quarterly language assessments, and parent satisfaction surveys. The report on the pilot year of this early intervention program shows that, though the sample is small, there is significant improvement in infant receptive and expressive language for infants identified before seven months of age, as well as a high level of satisfaction from families who have received services.

An innovative instructional philosophy in the field of deaf education—bilingual-bicultural (bi-bi) education—is likely to raise new questions for courts to consider in interpreting the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This article reviews past litigation concerning the education of children who are deaf or hard of hearing and explores the new language of IDEA ′97 as it affects communication issues for these children. Arguing that IDEA ′97 and the 1999 implementing regulations make it more difficult for schools to ignore the primary language and preferred mode of communication of children who are deaf the authors speculate that courts may be less likely to view language and communication modes as educational methods and, therefore, less likely to defer to the decisions of school authorities than in past court cases.