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.
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