ASL astounds!

Hello again!

It is so much fun watching Del sign. She watches us so intently, and tries so hard to get the hand shapes right. She has become extremely interested in the alphabet, and will sign most letters and mouth or say some as we go through the song. As mentioned in my previous post, her current favorite signs are "Hmmm. . .idea!" and "Happy New Year!" Here is a video with Del signing those two phrases.

Del has started to really hone in on the facial expression aspects of ASL, and can do some pretty impressive things with her eyebrows (definitely from Daddy's side!). Here she is playing a favorite game of hers - saying yes and no with exaggerated facial expression. She also really enjoys playing the contrarian. . .if we say no, she says yes. . .if we say yes, she says no. It's actually worked in our favor because I can pretty much bet on the success of a little reverse psychology!

Another new ASL skill of Del's is using classifiers. Classifiers are used in ASL to show movement, location, and appearance. After a signer indicates a person or thing (such as a deer), a classifier can be used in its place to show where and how it moves (such as running, laying down, sleeping), what it looks like (big, tiny, injured), and where it is located (in water, on top of a mountain). Del became very enamored with Christmas this year, and loves Santa and the reindeer. After watching Daddy and Grandma tell stories about them, she started to sign with classifiers to show the deer running slow and fast.

Lastly, here is a longer video demonstrating Del signing the ABCs and then signing along as Mommy sings "Itsy Bitsy Spider" and "Row Row Row Your Boat" twice each. At the very beginning of the video, Del signs "pink" and "purple," "old" and "new," "warm," "hat," "monkey," "red," "yellow" and "green." She signs all of this as I am asking her about her new coat and hat. During the first two songs, she signs "spider," a classifer of the spider climbing the spout, "rain," "washed out," "sunrise," and "dry." During the second two songs, she signs "row," "boat," "merrily (happy)," and "dream."

And now that I feel accomplished in catching up on my blog, I'm going to go pick up little Miss Del from daycare and go play in the sunshine! Have a great weekend, everyone!

Signing in the Park and Moon

Hi there. Here are the videos I am always promising! 

 

Del adds "mama" to BOTH her languages!

Hallelujah! At long last "mama" has crossed the lips of my dear child, and a sign has emerged to refer to me that does not look exactly like "milk." The sign came a few days ago in the form of a "1" sign produced around the cheek/jaw area. Del said "mama" for the first time just today ("today" was April 27th) while holding her arms for me to pick her up. I started celebrating like a fool but couldn't help it; there's just something magical about your baby calling you mama for the very first time.

I've gone through and made some lists and organized things a bit so they make more sense from a developmental point of view. I've categorized Del's ASL signs to date by handshape as much as possible so that it's easier to see the correlation between her fine motor development and her manual language bursts. Typically, the first handshape babies use when learning ASL is the "open hand" or "5 hand." This handshape can be manipulated as soon as the child is able to extend the fingers open from the palm.

Although it's not clear if motor development always drives language development or vice versa with respect to manual language learners (although I'm inclined to believe it works both ways, as with most things in this world), it's pretty simple to see that when babies start to use their hands to talk, the (proto-)signs used do not require a great deal of skill. As the signing child improves her nonlinguistic dexterity (for example, extending an index finger from a closed fist to perhaps pick a nostril), the handshapes that start to emerge for signing are naturally derived from these new and more complex physical abilities.

In that line of thinking, something that I am very curious about is whether children who sign tend to have accelerated fine motor development. For example, I wonder if children who are born into signing families master a motor milestone such as the pincer grasp sooner than children who learn only spoken languages. For a signing child, the motivation for such developments is doubled, meaning: the pincer grasp, in addition to being an excellent blueberry-nabbing tool, is also a linguistic handshape for many useful signs in ASL (a.k.a. the "G" handshape).

Now, back to the matter "at hand" (so to speak). . .

Del's ASL as of April 27th, 2011 (13 months, 11 days)

"5"

"hi" "please" "tree" "cheese" "more(2)" "thank you" "bye-bye" "want(1)" "finish (all done)" "don't want" "sleep(2)" "high-five!"

"Open A"

"milk"

"1"

"daddy" "mommy" "water" "where?" "what's that? (pointing)" "sleep(1)" "more(1)"

"G"

"more(3)" "birdie" "pick up" 

 "Curved Hand"

"share" "change" 

 "Claw 5"

"basketball" "ball" "want(2)"

 "Flat B"

"doggie"

The words with numbers next to them indicate either two different variations on a sign, or a sign that uses two different handshapes (such as "1" pointed into the palm of "5" to indicate "more," compared with two "G" handshapes meeting at the fingertips for the same meaning). The handshapes are produced in different locations with various different movements for the words listed. Some of her handshapes are not precise yet, such as her "claw 5," which is produced with slightly less "clawing" than seen in the photo above. However, the 6 handshapes that she uses so far are visually distinct from one-another, and are used consistently to communicate a surprising variety of words (26!!).  There are a couple Del-invented signs that cannot be described simply, such as "poop" and "don't want." I will do my best to capture these more intricate Del-isms on video to share what they look like.

Del continues to link two signs together in multiple different ways, typically with "more (insert food or drink)" or "where (mommy/daddy/milk)?" She uses the head shake "no" as a linguistic tool, for example pointing to the fridge for me to open it and then waiting as I list things inside as she either points and smiles to indicate, "that's what I want!" or shakes her head no. My favorite new development is when we ask Del if she is ready to go to sleep. She will either shake her head no or point to the bedroom and sign "sleep." This has alleviated so much nap-time and bedtime drama in recent weeks, and the pure fact that she has a role in the decision seems to make her that much more eager to drift off to la-la land.

Speaking of la-la land, that's where I am heading! Until next time, happy signing/talking/singing/sharing/speaking/listening/loving! Good night.

First signs, first words?

To any parents (or aunties or uncles, siblings or friends), what were your baby's (or babies') first signs and/or words? What things do you remember about their language around ten months of age? Is your baby bi- (or tri-) lingual? If yes, what language did/does that baby prefer? At what age did baby begin to code-switch, or go back and forth with ease between the two languages?

The She-Beast Roars (alternate title: Del's sound exploration continues)

My oh my how the days fly by. Here I am, desperately late in buying my airplane tickets for a trip home for the holidays, and I barely registered that Thanksgiving has come and gone so quickly. Again. It would seem I still find wonder in the rapidity of life. It still surprises me when I blink and I'm this old. Sitting right here. On this day of all days. And my daughter is nearing nine months old. I ponder such thoughts and can't help but wonder: is this what drives us humans in our lives to learn and do and accomplish? Is that what drives me? The incessant feeling as though the passing of time is like gravity towards the future, pulling us along, every day closer to our demise than our inception. Is that what makes us stop to savor the magic and beauty of the tiny moments in life? Is that why I get caught up staring at Del, trying to memorize what her face looks like this very moment? Life and language are both fleeting and ephemeral like that. The perfect words come out to match the moment just experienced, and then poof! they're both gone, dissipated into the ether and forever after relying on our tricky memories to lock those moments, those images, those words down in some cerebral vault to be brought forth and enjoyed at some point in the future.

Wow, ok. Major digression there. Just feeling a little mortal lately. Something to do with motherhood, I'm thinking.

Onto the declared subject of this blog: Del's growling. And screeching. And noise making in general. It is delightful and exciting and only very rarely is it so terrible that I have to hand her off to Daddy F so I can run outside and give my ears a break. She stopped babbling a few weeks back, seemingly to focus her energy on signing and how to make the most monstrous sounds possible for an eight-month-old. She will get super excited when I'm feeding her and will start grunting and flapping her arms like she wants to fly out of her high chair. I have to trick her with silly dances and songs to get the spoon in her mouth while she's grinning at her ridiculous mama. After babbling pretty consistently on the /b/ and /d/ sounds a few weeks/months back, Del has now started to play with all kinds of nonlinguistic sounds. Or rather, non English sounds, such as tongue clicking and velar frication and raspberries and lip popping and "yayayayaYA!" She has started to produce some variegated, or varied, babbling, such as "badaga," where she alternates between different consonants but stays on the same vowel. She makes the /k/ (as in "key") sound often now, along with /g/ (as in "go"), and a laterally lisped /s/ (similar to the sound in "see" but said like Sylvester from Looney Tunes).

Her signing continues to astound me. I just can't get over the fact that this tiny human is already actively communicating in symbols. She has two signs that she uses very consistently, but she uses them in different ways. Her most common sign is "change," which she will initiate with us to let us know she needs to be changed. She also signs it while she is being changed and waits for affirmation from us, then smiles. She signs "milk," but not yet as a request. She will identify what it means by signing it often while she's nursing, but she hasn't initiated it yet to let me know she's hungry. She does that by panting and laughing maniacally as she grabs at the front of my blouse! Just another form of communication! Gotta say I'm looking forward to her growing out of that one.

I have videos to share, just having a bit of difficulty getting them up for various computer-related annoyances. I'll have two or three clips posted by the end of the weekend.

Happy (almost) Friday to you all. Any fun plans for the weekend?

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.

Ba-ba-ba babbling!

Before I begin I want to clarify some linguistic terms. When we talk about sounds in language, we use the term phoneme to mean the smallest unit of sound that can convey meaning. For example, both b and p are English phonemes because "big" and "pig" mean two different things. When we write about phonemes we represent them in slashed lines, such that the phoneme for the sound in "mom" is written as /m/. As I talk about the sounds that Del is using I will use this linguistic convention to make things less confusing for me to write about as her language skills gain complexity. If something needs additional clarification, please let me know in a comment so that I can assure to the best of my abilities that every post I write is accessible to those with no prior knowledge of linguistics. Also, I have not yet been able to figure out how to add subtitles for those of you who are Deaf or HOH (which is not a huge deal right now because Del isn't yet talking!), but that is something I will be looking into and hopefully adding to future videos.

Now, onto babbling! Babbling in English typically starts with bilabial sounds, which are produced by bringing both lips together such as for the sounds /m/ and /b/. These sounds are easy for a baby to make because the lips are fairly large articulators, or parts of the mouth used for creating speech sounds, such as the lips, tongue, alveolar ridge, velum, etc (see diagram above for reference points for the various articulators). Bilabial sounds occur early in babbling development because using them for sounds production doesn't require a great deal of fine motor skill. The bilabial sounds that babies usually babble with first are voiced phonemes /b/ and /m/, which are produced with vocal cords vibration, as opposed to the voiceless phoneme /p/ which is produced without vocal cord vibration. To get a feeling for what this means, put your hand on your throat and hum on an /m/ sound. That vibration you feel is your voice turning on; your vocal cords vibrating. Now keep your hand on your throat and repeat a soft /p/ sound; see, no vibration!

In typical babbling development, /b/ will usually precede /p/ . I believe this is because it's easier for babies to simply turn on their voice for /a/ (all vowel phonemes in English are voiced) and then bring their lips together and apart to create the syllable /ba/, than it is for them to time the vibration of their vocal cords for a voiceless+voiced syllable like /pa/. Babies also tend to alternate early on in babbling between nasal phonemes, or sounds made with air flowing through the nose such as /m/ and /n/, and oral phonemes, or sounds made with air flowing through the mouth such as /b/ and /d/.  The reason that nasal and oral phonemes such as /m/ and /b/ are often interchangeably babbled is because these young babies have not yet mastered control of their velum, the soft flap of tissue way at the back of the soft palate that opens and closes the doorway between the oral and nasal cavities. The video posted here demonstrates our baby's (pretty darn adorable) version of this learning curve.

Del started her English babbling experience by exploring bilabial sounds /m/ and /b/ right around five months of age, give or take a week. This video was (luckily!) captured very early in her babbling career, for which I'm grateful because it demonstrates that she's still working on the timing of her breath support and the movement of her velum opening and closing, and is inconsistent with the sounds she creates. She seems to be gearing herself up to make sounds by moving her lips and tongue without any vocalization prior to the babbling. The video was taken about two weeks ago (on September 7th), which any fellow parent can attest is a lifetime in the rapid development of an infant! She is currently babbling more consistently with /b/ and /m/ sounds, and to date has also used the phonemes /n/ (as in "no"), /h/ (as in "hi"), /d/ (as in "dye"), /g/ (as in "guy"), /w/ (as in "why"), /j/ (as in "yes"), and the occasional non-linguistic "raspberry" that babies seem to love making so much! She also frequently squeals, screeches, and growls, delighting in the sheer noise she is able to create. Her vocalizing still occurs, but less frequently now that she has discovered the magical fun of consonants.

Her ASL babbling started around four months with frequent hand waving and finger play. As she grows, her hand movements have become smaller and more precise, with more of the movements occurring within the linguistic signing space in front of her body. She has recently started to experiment more with fine motor skills when hand babbling, and will hold her hands up in front of her face while she's playing quietly by herself and turn them around and make various hand shapes with one or both hands. To date we have seen her make the handshapes for the letters "A," "N," "S," "T," "L," and many of her own invention. She also will hold both hands up and rotate them around each other as if she is signing, "sign." My personal favorite is when she completes some kind of Del-invented hand sign and then holds it up to show us with the widest, most proud smile on her face. Yesterday Daddy F, Del and I were out for breakfast at a local greasy spoon. Del was sitting in her stroller, observing all the lights and lines around us while Daddy F and I chatted and ate our breakfast. There was a man sitting alone in the booth next to us who was exchanging smiles with Del. At one point she held up her hand with fingers spread and palm facing him and waved it a little - a classic wave. Then she made an "L" with her thumb and pointer finger, and pointed right at him, precise as could be! The only way it could have been better is if she had winked at him.