Tuesday, July 27, 2010
Homeschool Blog Carnival
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Monday, July 26, 2010
The Tools To Talk
My mom majored in deaf education for a short while in college, an education that may have seemed by some to be wasted entirely when she married my father and became a full time wife and mother.
In due time however, an adoption added to our family a beautiful young lady who had been born with cerebral palsy and profound retardation, she would never function at any higher level than a two year old and she could not speak. But she could sign.
So my family learned some basic sign language, nothing elaborate but the basics. And as we learned sign language for her it naturally began to transfer to the babies in the family, it is amazing how quickly they pick up on things. Eat, and milk, more. Please and thank-you and Mommy and Daddy, those are just a few of the signs that are both simple for an infant to learn and yet very valuable.
Infants develop the ability for receptive speech long before the muscles needed for vocalization have developed to the point necessary for speech, and this can often be a cause of frustration.
As Haydon has gotten old enough we have begun to introduce some basic signs to him. ("Dog" is his favorite, how could it not be when his mother's been brain-washing him since before birth to be in love with dogs?)
They ("They" being those anonymous experts that everyone refers to when they don't really know what they're talking about) used to say that if you taught a child to sign it would delay speech. They know they were wrong now, in fact quite the opposite is often true.
I don't know how they came to think that signing delays speech, but it seems to me that the fallacy had its roots in some common misconceptions about what communication is and how it is learned.
Vocalizing your thoughts into words, what we call speech, is the most common form of communication and the most recognizable. But in and of itself, it is not communication. Communication is a discussion, a taking of turns and a sharing of thoughts, sharing one's intentions with another for the purpose of feed-back.
While words are a very effective tool for communication, the mere use of words themselves does not constitute communication.
Consciously or subconsciously, we all instinctively realize this. How many times have you over-heard a conversation among a group of adolescents where there was a multitude of words and absolutely no communication? "He was all like, ya know, I don't know, and I just like, didn't how I felt about it, ya know?"
We all know that is not communication.
To claim that sign language will delay speech is essentially to claim that the entire deaf community does not have true communication, but we call sign language "language" for a reason. Oral communication may not happen, but communication itself does. (Infants born to deaf parents often learn to sign as early as three or four months old, incidentally.)
Teaching apes and monkeys sign language was all the rage several decades ago, and while it is possible to claim that the apes were taught to sign, to claim that they were taught language and communication is a claim of outrageous arrogance.
Simians already knew how to communicate, they already had a language of their own. Watch two monkeys in a zoo for a while and you will soon realize that without words of any kind they are still communicating their intentions to each-other. Apes and monkeys already had all the skills for communication that they needed in their own community. Watch dogs interact for awhile, you will see communication without words.
Communication without words is a world-wide and interspecies phenomenon, with no limits on age or ability.
My sister has a t.shirt that reads "Not Being Able to Speak is Not the Same Thing as Having Nothing to Say", and I suppose that is the crux of the issue.
Infants are born with things to say and as they grow and progress in their experience and understanding of the world at a rapid rate their desire to communicate their needs and interests grows with them. The coordinated abilities for spoken speech are in fact often months behind an infant's ability to understand the concept itself of communication.
They just need tools. Left to themselves babies will often create signs of their own, but these signs are tragically lost when the adults around them have their heads stuck in the sands of their own low expectations of an infant's abilities, when they're stuck in the rut of oral communication alone.
But when care-givers listen, when they pay attention, when (even better) they introduce new tools in the form of new sign words, the door can be opened for a rich wealth of communication between the child and the world.
The advantage of signing is that by the time the vocal cords and the muscles of the tongue and mouth have matured enough to the point of being capable of producing speech, a strong foundation of those things essential to true communication (turn-taking, the communication of intent, etc.) has already been laid down.
In other words, when the tools arrive the child is ready for them.
In due time however, an adoption added to our family a beautiful young lady who had been born with cerebral palsy and profound retardation, she would never function at any higher level than a two year old and she could not speak. But she could sign.
So my family learned some basic sign language, nothing elaborate but the basics. And as we learned sign language for her it naturally began to transfer to the babies in the family, it is amazing how quickly they pick up on things. Eat, and milk, more. Please and thank-you and Mommy and Daddy, those are just a few of the signs that are both simple for an infant to learn and yet very valuable.
Infants develop the ability for receptive speech long before the muscles needed for vocalization have developed to the point necessary for speech, and this can often be a cause of frustration.
As Haydon has gotten old enough we have begun to introduce some basic signs to him. ("Dog" is his favorite, how could it not be when his mother's been brain-washing him since before birth to be in love with dogs?)
They ("They" being those anonymous experts that everyone refers to when they don't really know what they're talking about) used to say that if you taught a child to sign it would delay speech. They know they were wrong now, in fact quite the opposite is often true.
I don't know how they came to think that signing delays speech, but it seems to me that the fallacy had its roots in some common misconceptions about what communication is and how it is learned.
Vocalizing your thoughts into words, what we call speech, is the most common form of communication and the most recognizable. But in and of itself, it is not communication. Communication is a discussion, a taking of turns and a sharing of thoughts, sharing one's intentions with another for the purpose of feed-back.
While words are a very effective tool for communication, the mere use of words themselves does not constitute communication.
Consciously or subconsciously, we all instinctively realize this. How many times have you over-heard a conversation among a group of adolescents where there was a multitude of words and absolutely no communication? "He was all like, ya know, I don't know, and I just like, didn't how I felt about it, ya know?"
We all know that is not communication.
To claim that sign language will delay speech is essentially to claim that the entire deaf community does not have true communication, but we call sign language "language" for a reason. Oral communication may not happen, but communication itself does. (Infants born to deaf parents often learn to sign as early as three or four months old, incidentally.)
Teaching apes and monkeys sign language was all the rage several decades ago, and while it is possible to claim that the apes were taught to sign, to claim that they were taught language and communication is a claim of outrageous arrogance.
Simians already knew how to communicate, they already had a language of their own. Watch two monkeys in a zoo for a while and you will soon realize that without words of any kind they are still communicating their intentions to each-other. Apes and monkeys already had all the skills for communication that they needed in their own community. Watch dogs interact for awhile, you will see communication without words.
Communication without words is a world-wide and interspecies phenomenon, with no limits on age or ability.
My sister has a t.shirt that reads "Not Being Able to Speak is Not the Same Thing as Having Nothing to Say", and I suppose that is the crux of the issue.
Infants are born with things to say and as they grow and progress in their experience and understanding of the world at a rapid rate their desire to communicate their needs and interests grows with them. The coordinated abilities for spoken speech are in fact often months behind an infant's ability to understand the concept itself of communication.
They just need tools. Left to themselves babies will often create signs of their own, but these signs are tragically lost when the adults around them have their heads stuck in the sands of their own low expectations of an infant's abilities, when they're stuck in the rut of oral communication alone.
But when care-givers listen, when they pay attention, when (even better) they introduce new tools in the form of new sign words, the door can be opened for a rich wealth of communication between the child and the world.
The advantage of signing is that by the time the vocal cords and the muscles of the tongue and mouth have matured enough to the point of being capable of producing speech, a strong foundation of those things essential to true communication (turn-taking, the communication of intent, etc.) has already been laid down.
In other words, when the tools arrive the child is ready for them.
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