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Families with deaf parents and hearing children often demonstrate bimodal bilingualism, using both a signed and a spoken language. This study uses an audience design framework to analyze the home language use of two bimodal bilingual families in the United States. The school-age children in these families appeared to design their utterances for reception by their addressees while using as much speech as possible. All of the children demonstrated fluency in both American Sign Language and spoken English, and parent–child communication was generally easy and clear. The children typically signed to their parents, but the children in one family often included simultaneous speech when addressing the parent with the greatest receptive abilities for speech. They generally used only speech to address their siblings, leaving parents who were present to either request a translation or accept a degree of exclusion. However, in each family, the oldest child sometimes accommodated to the presence of a deaf parent by including signs with his speech to his brothers. Despite the parents’ institution of family language policies meant to encourage the use of sign, the children’s behavior reflected the sociolinguistic dominance of spoken English in the wider society.
