Hearing children from deaf families, Codas, represent a relatively invisible linguistic and cultural minority. Many hearing people are unaware of the fact that American Sign Language (ASL) is a separate language with its own grammatical structure unlike that of English. This misconception has led to an emphasis on oral education for deaf people in this country that in turn has created a stronger connection between the Deaf community and ASL (Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan 1996; Ladd 2003).