Time Flies When You Can't Keep Up!

It's almost my bed time, but I have to get some of these ideas and notes down in black and white before I blink and Del has entered yet another new stage that I won't find time to document. Consistency is key in parenthood. . .or so I've been told. . .and it's apparently something I'm still attempting to achieve! Let me touch on some of the milestones we've checked off since last time I posted.

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. 

Hand babbling "evidence" ?

Not a month into this blog and I've already fallen behind my weekly post commitment! Ah well, such is the life of a new (working) mother. Here I sit at 8:30, ready to put some thoughts to type, and it feels like midnight. . .or later.

After reading back through my previous post, I realize I have to offer one more disclaimer, and to warn of many more likely to come! It is intimidating to write about something so detailed and intense, and about which i admittedly am no expert. I imagine in the course of this blog's life that I will have to put my proverbial foot in my mouth more than a few times. This disclaimer is an important one that will hopefully save me from having to defend myself against accurate accusations that there is no such thing as the typical child. The disclaimer is this: when I write about a sound "typically" being used first in babbling, or that a child will "typically" learn one particular sound before another, please take those statements with a big fat grain of salt. While there are well-documented patterns in English language acquisition, there is also a great deal of individual variation, and most children are idiosyncratic in some way or another in what they say or do when compared with other children their age. For example, although Del started using /b/ as her first consistently babbled phoneme, which is in line with so-called typical phoneme acquisition for English, she also started making "raspberries" after she started babbling in earnest, which is opposite of the typical sound exploration we tend to observe.

At any rate, if you come across a statement that you disagree with, or a question of mine that you have an answer for (even if the answer is just a guess!), please share. If you have a random comment about one of your children, or your students, or about something vaguely language or baby or Deaf or new-parent related, share!

And with that, it's my time to share. . .another video! This one is brief because I am having a very hard time catching Del in her wild hand-babbling giddiness. When she's vocal-babbling or screeching in the other room I can hear her, and I run in with the video camera to try and catch her before she sees me and stops mid-screech. Since I can't hear her hand-babbling, I'm quite limited as to how much footage I can get of her exploring language with her hands. I'm further limited because she tends to hand-babble when she's either talking to Daddy F's family on the VP, or first thing in the morning while we're slowly waking up in bed, or at night when it's dark and she's lying down, quietly mesmerizing herself with her manual dexterity before she falls asleep. 

It's interesting to me that at six months, Del already seems to have a sense of when to use her voice and when to use her hands when attempting to communicate. She still demonstrates crossover when she vocalizes with Daddy F, but I think it's partly because Daddy F uses his voice a lot when they play and talk to each-other, and he makes silly sounds with her more often than I do. She hand-babbles with me because I both talk and sign to her, so it makes sense that she would use both communication modalities with me during her language development. I do notice lately, however, that when she is sitting with us talking to someone on VP that she rarely vocalizes and tends to get very active and excited with her manual babbling. If you are Deaf and have a hearing child, when did your child seem to "get" that s/he should only sign with you and other Deaf individuals, and speak when talking to someone hearing? It's a fascinating part of language development for bi-modal bilinguals. I have two friends who are Deaf with a hearing daughter. She both signs and speaks beautifully, but in all the time I have spent with her, she refuses to engage in spoken communication with me. Is it because she associates me with deafness because I'm usually the only hearing person and I am signing along with the other Deaf adults? Is it because she prefers to sign and will only speak when the her conversation partner doesn't know ASL? I have so much curiosity about these things and am eager to hear your stories and perspectives on the subject.

This is a (very!) limited example of what I consider to be Del's version of hand-babbling. The intro and exit parts of the video are her waving, with the middle portion demonstrating a little bit of her hand and finger play. I'll keep working on capturing a better clip with more finger play (that's my favorite thing in the world to watch but unfortunately her favorite time to do it is when she's breastfeeding!), maybe by keeping the camera close at hand when we have family on the other end of our VP. She's very astute and tends to stop doing whatever it is I'm trying to capture as soon as she notices me with the camera, so I'll have to improve my stealth-mode recording tactics, and quick! It doesn't help that our Flip video camera closely resembles her very favorite toy. . .my cell phone.