ABSTRACT
Kay Meadow-Orlans has been a pioneer in affirming the competence of deaf mothers (Meadow, Greenberg, Erting, & Carmichael, 1981). She has also had a long-standing interest in the question of maternal sensitivity and has documented the problems that can occur when there is a mismatch of hearing status between parent and child (Meadow-Orlans & Spencer, 1996; Meadow-Orlans & Steinberg, 1993). One way deaf mothers are well equipped to be sensitive to the needs of their deaf children is that they are skilled in communicating in the visual mode, in general terms, as well as fluent in a visual language, which allows them to provide accessible language input to their children from the beginning of life.
