Vocal Development
Del continues with her screeches, squeals, and growls. She is also having a lot of fun playing around with the sound her saliva makes when she sucks air in through the sides of her teeth. This is another non-linguistic sound - like raspberries or screeching - that I like to call her "voiceless ingressive lateral salival frication." If you don't understand why I call it that, consider yourself lucky; it means you're not a big dork like me! Del has added another (somewhat terrifying) non-linguistic sound to her vocal repertoire. She likes to suck in air through tightly constricted vocal folds, creating a sound that closely resembles that of a baby gasping for breath. With the whooping cough scare running rampant in California, I was admittedly freaked out when I started hearing her make this noise. After careful observation of both her overall health and the instances where she made this unfortunate noise (unfortunate because she loves it and yet I'm left questioning whether or not to rush her to the doctor), I've concluded that she's just plain having fun with all of her noise-making parts, and most likely delighting in the reaction this particular noise gets out of her mama.
Del continues to play around with canonical babbling (meaning she babbles repeatedly on the same consonant-vowel syllable such as /ba/), and in addition to the sounds mentioned in my previous post, she has played around with the phonemes /f/ (as in "fun") and /ŋ/ (as in "sing"). The /ŋ/ sound is not used at the beginning of syllables in English (like it is in some languages, such as in the Vietnamese last name "Nguyen"), which has not yet prevented Del from using it in that position when she babbles on the syllable /ŋa/. This is an interesting indicator, suggesting that at seven months of age she has not yet mastered the syllable structure of her native spoken language. Research has suggested that infants can distinguish between the phonemes of their native language as early as four months of age (called categorical perception), and that around six months they begin to hone in on the sounds that are used in their native language as distinct from the sounds (and the rules governing how those sounds are used) of other languages. In other words, Del may understand on some level that /ŋ/ is not a sound used at the beginning of words in English, but her developing mouth and mind are still playing around with it in all ways possible and will figure out the sound's true linguistic role in English somewhere later along the way (dear readers: references and more information on this subject would be greatly appreciated!)
Del is playing around a lot more with pitch variation on prolonged vowel sounds, and has begun to "sing" along with me when I'm singing. She will participate in conversation with me, taking 4-5 conversational turns with whatever noise she's making at the time, and gets especially excited when I'm talking and signing at the same time. She recently engaged a friend of hers who is the exact same age (born within an hour of each-other) in a conversation. The two of them talked back and forth for three conversational turns before they turned their attention to other things. I was amazed that our tiny babies had such confidence and control with their language, and that they obviously didn't need us big clumsy adults to interfere when they wanted to have a nice chat!
Manual Development
Del is absolutely delighted by her fingers. She will often bring her fingertips together at a quiet time during the day, such as right before a nap or during nursing, and gently alternate fingers as she calmly continues to gain dexterity and speed with her fine motor skills. It's fascinating to watch her manual play for linguistic signs, wondering what she makes of the two languages in her life, and what it is she's trying to say to us when she makes the "F" handshape (palm facing out with thumb and index finger connected in a circle) three times in the span of a few minutes and presents it to us with glee and pride. We joke that it's because her first sign is her daddy's name sign (which is formed with the "F" handshape), but realistically we have not for certain seen a first sign yet. Both Daddy F and I reported to each-other on the same day that we think she signed "daddy" with an "L" handshape on her forehead (the real sign for "daddy" is all fingers extended with the thumb on the forehead), but we're not going so far as to claim first sign quite yet; I guess we're not completely convinced of it's linguistic intent. . .either that or we're in denial of how fast our baby is growing and learning! At any rate, it's clear that Del is aware of her signing space, and various hand shapes, and is now showing signs of awareness for placement of signs (i.e., her forehead).
Del becomes very obviously and immediately excited when she sees someone signing to her on the VP. The video below shows just how delighted she is by her participation with signed communication, and exhibits a few rounds of turn-taking in her manual-babbling "conversation" with her grandpa.
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