What Rilla’s saying at the end there is “With Alex, Leah, and Hopkins.” Totally unprompted, I swear.
When I watched our Christmas 2005 video the other day, the bit that gave me the biggest pang of nostalgia was watching Wonderboy signing away. He hardly signs at all anymore, now that he talks so much. I’m thrilled with his verbal speech, but I really miss the signing. It’s funny to think back on how much ASL dominated our lives (in a rich and satisfying way) for a couple of years there, and now our use and pursuit of sign language has slipped to the back burner, becoming something of a hobby rather than a daily necessity. Jane still wants to certify as an ASL interpreter someday, and every few months we pull out our materials and learn another chunk of vocabulary and grammar. There are community college courses we might take next year. It’s a beautiful and important language, and I don’t want to let it go, even if our boy doesn’t need rely on it for communication the way he once did.
And of course the Signing Time DVDs remain in great demand with my little people, as the video above attests. With Rilla, we’re seeing all the benefits of sign language we saw with the first three girls—because rudimentary ASL was a part of our baby & toddler life from the get-go, long before we had a Wonderboy or knew he had hearing loss.
Here are some old posts singing the praises of our favorite kiddie DVDs:
Wonderboy’s hearing loss came as a shock to us. Sure, we knew he’d failed the newborn hearing test. Three times. But those rounds of testing were administered in the NICU where there is always a humming and beeping of background noise, and the tech had told us that ambient noise could skew the test results. We had more pressing things to worry about: his (minor) heart defect; his recovery from omphalocele repair surgery; the genetic testing necessary to determine whether he had a potentially serious chromosomal syndrome; the fact that he was going home on oxygen. At least he was going home, and we tucked the hearing-test business to the back of our minds and focused on the immediate business of keeping him alive.
Every month the health department sent us a letter reminding us to have the hearing screen repeated. Sure thing, we said, just as soon as things slow down a bit. We were constantly having to take him to some specialist or another. The chromosome study came back negative: his medical issues were not due to a genetic syndrome. He was just one of those babies for whom something goes slightly awry early on in utero, resulting in a number of physical abnormalities down the line. An MRI had shown brain abnormality, but what its effects would be, no one could say: time will tell, they said. (They are still saying that.) He had extremely high muscle tone (hypertonia) and could not stretch out his arms and legs very far. His fists were tightly clenched. He started physical therapy at four months of age. He required emergency surgery to repair a double hernia with incarcerated bowel. The cardiologist was still keeping a close eye on his heart. The hearing test would just have to wait.
Besides, we told ourselves, we know he isn’t deaf. He startled to loud noises. Of all the things there were to worry about, we really didn’t think hearing loss was one of them.
But by six months, we had suspicions. He wasn’t babbling. He didn’t turn his head at the sound of my voice, lighting up with recognition before even seeing me, as our other children had. We took him back for another hearing screen.
He failed.
The audiologist said something about a “mild” hearing loss, and I thought that didn’t sound too bad. “Oh, no,” she told me, hastening to set me straight. “It isn’t like a ‘mild’ fever. ANY hearing loss is serious. Most speech sounds fall at the bottom of the scale, so if you have any hearing loss at all, you’re going to have trouble with speech.”
As it turned out, Wonderboy’s loss was a bit more serious than the audiologist first thought. Further testing placed him at the “moderate” level on the scale of mild—moderate—severe—profound. Unaided, Wonderboy’s ears can’t detect sounds softer than 50 decibels. Most speech sounds fall in the 20-decibel-or-lower range. Our little guy can hear vowel sounds, the louder middles of words, but few of the consonants that shape sound into speech. For Wonderboy, people probably sound a lot like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Wah-WAH-wah-wah-waahh-wah. We learned about the speech banana: the area on a graph that shows where speech sounds fall in the decibel and frequency ranges. Wonderboy can’t hear sounds above the horizontal 50 line on that chart.
(More or less. He has a sloping loss which is slightly better at the lower frequencies.)
By his first birthday he was wearing hearing aids, and what a huge difference we could see! Aided, he tests around the 20-decibel range. He hears and understands a great deal of what we say. He is two and a half years old now, and he is finally beginning to add some consonant sounds to his verbal speech. Daddy used to be “Ah-ee” and now he is “Gaggy.” (This cracks me up. You can get a lot of mileage out of calling your husband Gag.) Grandpa is Amp-Ha. Wonderboy’s baby sister is “Gay-gee.” As you can see, he doesn’t have a B sound yet. His M is perfect, though; I have been Mommy, clear as a bell, for over a year.
But Wonderboy’s verbal speech is only part of the picture. His actual vocabulary is enormous, thanks to sign language. We are huge fans of the Signing Time DVDs. He uses a combination of sign and speech; we all do. Although it appears he will be primarily a verbal person as he gets older, sign language will always be an important second language for him. Hearing aids, incredible as the technology is nowadays, don’t do you any good at the swimming pool. Just for instance.
Hard of hearing. It used to be a phrase that conjured up in my mind the image of a grizzled old man with an ear trumpet. What? What’d ye say? Speak up, lad! (Apparently he is a grizzled old Scotsman.) Now it applies to my son. Words pop up on a TV screen, “closed captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing,” and I’ll give a little mental jump: Oh! That means Wonderboy!
Watching our children learn to speak is one of the great delights of parenthood. We mothers tend to collect their funny pronunciations, their experimentation with the meanings of words. This time around, my joy has been doubled, for I get to see communication unfold in two languages. His funny little toddler signs are just as endearing as any “helidopter” or “oapymeal” ever uttered by a two-year-old. (“Oapymeal” was one of Jane’s. It meant oatmeal. I served it often just to hear her say it.)
There are some links to American Sign Language resourcesin the sidebar of my old site. (I’ll set up a page here soon as I get a chance.) I can’t say enough about the wonders and benefits of ASL, not just for deaf and hard of hearing children, but for all babies and toddlers, especially those with any type of speech delay. ASL is a beautiful, nuanced language, a visual poetry. I count myself privileged to have been put in the way of learning it. Jane is determined to certify as an interpreter someday, and I have to admit I’m a little jealous. I wish I’d learned at her age.
Wonderboy makes a fist and touches a knuckle to his cheek, wiggling the hand. “Ah-hul!” he shouts. Apple, in two languages. The speech banana? We’ll get there, one way or another.
This Lilting House post gets more search-engine hits than anything else I’ve written. Every week I am amazed by how many people land on my blog via a search for “speech banana” and related terms. I thought it might be helpful if I reposted it here. This post was written in June of 2006. More recent posts on related subjects can be found in the hearing loss archive, including a photo essay about getting ear molds for hearing aids and advice regarding the newborn hearing screen.
Wonderboy’s hearing loss came as a shock to us. Sure, we knew he’d failed the newborn hearing test. Three times. But those rounds of testing were administered in the NICU where there is always a humming and beeping of background noise, and the tech had told us that ambient noise could skew the test results. We had more pressing things to worry about: his (minor) heart defect; his recovery from omphalocele repair surgery; the genetic testing necessary to determine whether he had a potentially serious chromosomal syndrome; the fact that he was going home on oxygen. At least he was going home, and we tucked the hearing-test business to the back of our minds and focused on the immediate business of keeping him alive.
Every month the health department sent us a letter reminding us to have the hearing screen repeated. Sure thing, we said, just as soon as things slow down a bit. We were constantly having to take him to some specialist or another. The chromosome study came back negative: his medical issues were not due to a genetic syndrome. He was just one of those babies for whom something goes slightly awry early on in utero, resulting in a number of physical abnormalities down the line. An MRI had shown brain abnormality, but what its effects would be, no one could say: time will tell, they said. (They are still saying that.) He had extremely high muscle tone (hypertonia) and could not stretch out his arms and legs very far. His fists were tightly clenched. He started physical therapy at four months of age. He required emergency surgery to repair a double hernia with incarcerated bowel. The cardiologist was still keeping a close eye on his heart. The hearing test would just have to wait.
Besides, we told ourselves, we know he isn’t deaf. He startled to loud noises. Of all the things there were to worry about, we really didn’t think hearing loss was one of them.
But by six months, we had suspicions. He wasn’t babbling. He didn’t turn his head at the sound of my voice, lighting up with recognition before even seeing me, as our other children had. We took him back for another hearing screen.
He failed.
The audiologist said something about a “mild” hearing loss, and I thought that didn’t sound too bad. “Oh, no,” she told me, hastening to set me straight. “It isn’t like a ‘mild’ fever. ANY hearing loss is serious. Most speech sounds fall at the bottom of the scale, so if you have any hearing loss at all, you’re going to have trouble with speech.”
As it turned out, Wonderboy’s loss was a bit more serious than the audiologist first thought. Further testing placed him at the “moderate” level on the scale of mild—moderate—severe—profound. Unaided, Wonderboy’s ears can’t detect sounds softer than 50 decibels. Most speech sounds fall in the 20-decibel-or-lower range. Our little guy can hear vowel sounds, the louder middles of words, but few of the consonants that shape sound into speech. For Wonderboy, people probably sound a lot like Charlie Brown’s teacher. Wah-WAH-wah-wah-waahh-wah. We learned about the speech banana: the area on a graph that shows where speech sounds fall in the decibel and frequency ranges. Wonderboy can’t hear sounds above the horizontal 50 line on that chart.
(More or less. He has a sloping loss which is slightly better at the lower frequencies.)
By his first birthday he was wearing hearing aids, and what a huge difference we could see! Aided, he tests around the 20-decibel range. He hears and understands a great deal of what we say. He is two and a half years old now, and he is finally beginning to add some consonant sounds to his verbal speech. Daddy used to be “Ah-ee” and now he is “Gaggy.” (This cracks me up. You can get a lot of mileage out of calling your husband Gag.) Grandpa is Amp-Ha. Wonderboy’s baby sister is “Gay-gee.” As you can see, he doesn’t have a B sound yet. His M is perfect, though; I have been Mommy, clear as a bell, for over a year.
But Wonderboy’s verbal speech is only part of the picture. His actual vocabulary is enormous, thanks to sign language. He uses a combination of sign and speech; we all do. Although it appears he will be primarily a verbal person as he gets older, sign language will always be an important second language for him. Hearing aids, incredible as the technology is nowadays, don’t do you any good at the swimming pool. Just for instance.
Hard of hearing. It used to be a phrase that conjured up in my mind the image of a grizzled old man with an ear trumpet. What? What’d ye say? Speak up, lad! (Apparently he is a grizzled old Scotsman.) Now it applies to my son. Words pop up on a TV screen, “closed captioned for the deaf and hard of hearing,” and I’ll give a little mental jump: Oh! That means Wonderboy!
Watching our children learn to speak is one of the great delights of parenthood. We mothers tend to collect their funny pronunciations, their experimentation with the meanings of words. This time around, my joy has been doubled, for I get to see communication unfold in two languages. His funny little toddler signs are just as endearing as any “helidopter” or “oapymeal” ever uttered by a two-year-old. (“Oapymeal” was one of Jane’s. It meant oatmeal. I served it often just to hear her say it.)
I put some links in my sidebar for American Sign Language resources. I can’t say enough about the wonders and benefits of ASL, not just for deaf and hard of hearing children, but for all babies and toddlers, especially those with any type of speech delay. ASL is a beautiful, nuanced language, a visual poetry. I count myself privileged to have been put in the way of learning it. Jane is determined to certify as an interpreter someday, and I have to admit I’m a little jealous. I wish I’d learned at her age.
Wonderboy makes a fist and touches a knuckle to his cheek, wiggling the hand. “Ah-hul!” he shouts. Apple, in two languages. The speech banana? We’ll get there, one way or another.
I was wondering what the research says about how hearing kids learning sign affects (if it does at all) their verbal speech acquisition. I assume it is like my 4yo learning romanian and english. his english is miles ahead of romanian, but learning romanian hasnt affected his english at all. just wondering if you had read anything about this.
That’s a very good question! As a matter of fact, teaching babies to sign does seem to have an affect on their verbal language development—a good one. I’ve read about at least two separate studies whose results demonstrated that children who used sign language as babies tend to score higher on IQ tests than non-signers. There was a study at the University of Alaska and another one at Davis, I believe. One of them tracked kids through age 8 and found that the baby-signers wound up reading at earlier ages and showed higher cognitive and verbal skills.
But honestly, even if that weren’t the case I’d be on board with baby sign just for the way it smooths the toddler years. You get to bypass that stage where the little one knows exactly what she wants to tell you but doesn’t have the words for it yet, leading to the intense frustration that often winds up in a meltdown.
We’ve used baby sign with all our babies, even before Wonderboy came along. When Jane was about a year old, Scott’s boss’s wife very thoughtfully sent me an article on the subject, and I thought it was a brilliant concept. I taught Jane a few signs but we didn’t really take off with it until Rose came along. By then, Jane was three and had spent a lot of time in the hospital where she saw an ASL interpreter working with another patient. She was very interested and I was a young would-be homeschooling mommy eager to start strewing. 😉 I ordered this set of videos from the Timberdoodle catalog and we dove in.
The videos didn’t appeal to Jane—they are intended as tutorials for the parents of deaf babies and toddlers (and yes, how goosebumpy is that, considering what was in store for us a few babies later? God’s providence, anyone?) and the format is rather dry. But the vocabulary was perfect for daily use with my little ones. By the time Rose was 18 months, she was using about two dozen signs on a regular basis. I remember my relatives being impressed by her “please” and “thank you” at a family funeral. It is awfully nice to have “please” be a habit even before verbal speech begins.
When Beanie was a year old, Jane was six, and she and her friend Summer were both interested in learning ASL, so we watched the Sign With Me videos again. The little girls hung in there with the videos despite their dry format, and since they both had one-year-old sisters they really enjoyed being able to sign words like “yucky” and “silly.” We started checking children’s sign DVDs out of the library, and Summer’s family came across Signing Time. That was the beginning of a beeyootiful friendship…
But we had no idea, then, how important the Signing Time series—or, indeed, ASL itself—would become to us. When Wonderboy was born I launched right into baby sign, same as always, having no clue that he had hearing loss. He was six months old before we started to seriously worry about his hearing, and it was another three months (after a set of tubes proved fluid buildup wasn’t the problem) before we got a firm diagnosis.
I’ve already written about what happened next: how our family threw ourselves into the study of ASL for Wonderboy’s sake—and our own intense enjoyment. ASL is a beautiful, beautiful language. I wish I were more fluent—we are still plugging away on our own, but one of these days we’d like to study with a fluent signer. Jane hopes to become certified as an interpreter one day.
One piece of advice I have about teaching babies to sign is that it’s better to use real ASL (American Sign Language—if you’re American, that is) rather than one of the made-up “baby sign” programs. It seems to me that as long as you’re teaching signs, why not give the child a head start on a real second language? That’s one of the reasons I come out so strong for Signing Time (and no, I don’t get a commission from those folks)—it uses ASL.
We recently received the three latest installments of Signing Time, and once again I’m blown away by how fun and engaging they are, how practically useful the vocabulary is, and how effective the instruction is. Both Wonderboy and Rilla are doing a lot of counting these days, because there is a new “Counting Time” section of the show. The “ABC Time” segment has also been a big hit. The new editions are:
Move and Groove
Happy Birthday to You
Nice to Meet You
I really like the manners signs taught in that last one. I admit I still think the songs in Volumes 4, 5, and 6 are the best of the whole series, but once again the music is catchy and fun, and I honestly can’t say enough good things about these DVDs. Rachel Coleman and crew have hit upon a perfect format. In fact, I also think Signing Time gives reading skills a boost, since the English word for each sign is displayed next to the person demonstrating it.
Once Wonderboy’s hearing loss was diagnosed, we knew ASL would be an important second language for him—both as a bridge to verbal speech and as a backup for times when he isn’t wearing his hearing aids (or in case his hearing degenerates further as he gets older). There are different theories about signing with hard-of-hearing kids, and the “Total Communication” approach is what made most sense to us. His expressive and receptive language skills have consistently tested as at-or-above-age-level despite his “speech delay”—that delay is only with pronunciation. I am so grateful that we were already primed to jump into the use of ASL with him because of the “baby sign” trend. Some trends are sound and sensible. This is one!
Whoops, it’s all pixelly. No time to fix it now—back later!
UPDATED: Well, I tried and tried. I don’t know what’s wrong with the upload. Tried saving the movie file in various formats, but it comes out pixellated every time. Ah, well. She’s cute even in tiny dots.
Don’t ask me why I picked that particular moment to capture her litany of signs on film—a moment when one hand was clutching the treasured Pink Plastic Phone. She was there, the camera was there, and I’ve been meaning to record her baby signs for weeks. She is exploding with new ones every day, courtesy of her big brother and Signing Time. When Wonderboy and Rilla start signing to each other, I swear my heart turns to jelly. It’s sweeter than I could ever have imagined, back when she was in utero, kicking him through my belly as he signed himself to sleep.
I’m always on the lookout for useful resources, and this website looks promising: Mommy Speech Therapy. Posts range from practical advice for helping a child work on specific sounds to informative discussions about working with speech professionals, getting a diagnosis, and when to be concerned about things like lisps, pacifiers, and thumb-sucking.
It’s been a while since I wrote about Signing Time, but it occurred to me that I ought to mention it for new readers.
The Signing Time DVDs are a wonderful series of half-hour shows designed to teach American Sign Language (ASL) to children. Adults who happen to be in the room will find they can’t help but learn as well. The shows are delightful, with catchy songs, cute kids, and practical ASL vocabulary.
It’s hard for me to imagine our lives without Signing Time. Rachel Coleman, the creator, and her daughter Leah, who is deaf, and Leah’s cousin Alex, who is hearing, are practically part of our family. “Rachel says” and “Leah says” are regular utterances around here. When Wonderboy watches the videos, he looks back and forth from me to Rachel, or from his sisters to the children, in awed delight. His hands soar through the air, mimicking his beloved Rachel. He understands the spoken words “Signing Time” even without his hearing aids in. (This is significant. He probably hears something like “eye-ee-eye,” but he sure knows what it means.)
Rachel’s songs have become my personal highway belt-it-out favorites (along with Marie Bellet and Bruce Springsteen), because she *gets it* so completely. Leah was a year old when her parents learned she was deaf. Rachel’s family’s love and occupation is music, and my hat is off to Rachel Coleman for finding a way to so beautifully combine her old life with her new one. Next to the joy she has brought my children, my favorite thing about Rachel Coleman is her honesty in lyrics. Her song, “The Good,” expresses my understanding of motherhood better than anything I’ve ever written: “Maybe we won’t find easy, but baby we’ve found the good.”
Lately, Wonderboy has been re-immersed in these DVDs, asking for them daily. They are the ONLY television show he has ever shown any interest in watching, ever. When his sisters watch other shows, even cartoons, Wonderboy pays no attention. But for Signing Time, he is always all eyes and ears.
He has learned a ton of vocabulary from them, including (just lately) words like “remember,” “learn,” and “smart.” I wrote a post for Bonny Glen last night about what a big deal it is that he is now beginning to grasp abstract concepts (such as remember, learn, and smart!). I really think ST has a great deal to do with that.
Rilla (she is 15 months now) is also enchanted by ST and enchants the rest of us with her perfectly scrumptious signing…when she signs “More,” her daddy is putty in her plump little hands.
I also think the DVDs spurred Beanie along the path to reading when she was four and five years old. The English words for each sign appear on the screen before the signs are demonstrated, and those were some of the first words she learned how to read.
The shows are now being aired on PBS, so you can check your listings to see if it’s playing in your area. But the DVDs are a worthy investment (and they make great gifts). (And no, I don’t get a commission on these materials! I just love them.)
The first three volumes are simpler, younger, than later editions. Volumes 4-6 are my family’s favorites, except for Wonderboy, who prefers, ironically, the “Welcome to School” disk.
I see on the website there are two new “Practice Time” DVDs—I haven’t seen those yet.
We seem to have lost Volume 11, “My Neighborhood,” somewhere along the trail during our cross-country trip. I’m thinking about re-ordering it, because I know Wonderboy would be very into the whole police- officer-firefighter theme right now.
Monday morning, early. Wonderboy and I are off to speech therapy in a few minutes. His sessions have been going wonderfully well, and he is now regularly saying B and P sounds. This is huge progress; two months ago his only consonants were M, hard G, K, N, and an occasional H (as in "Huh moni!"—that’s "Good morning" to you conventionally annunciating types).
He loves Miss Tammie, the speech therapist, and our fun half-hours in her room, playing games, singing (okay, listening to Miss Tammie sing), putting the buh buh baby and the puh puh popcorn on the buh buh bus, and the puh puh puppy goes in the buh buh box.
His astonishing and rapid progress is due in large part, I believe, to Tammie’s use of something called "Visual Phonics." This language development program is actually new to Tammie, and we are more or less learning it together. The concept is truly brilliant. In Visual Phonics, a hand sign is assigned to every single sound. It’s like taking the sign language alphabet (with which Wonderboy is already quite familiar, though he does not sign it himself yet—when he was two, his favorite way to fall asleep was to watch my hand while I signed and sang the ABCs) one step further.
For example, there a sign for the B sound (buh). You use the ASL sign for B, a flat hand, fingers together and pointing up, thumb folded over the palm, and you hold that handshape up by your mouth, moving the B away from your lips as you say "Buh."
Not all the Visual Phonics signs are based on the ASL alphabet; the P has your fingers sort of exploding away from your lips. Really, it hardly matters WHAT the signs are; the brilliant innovation was in attaching signs to these small units of sound. There are signs for every speech sound, including consonant blends and all the vowel sounds, including diphthongs.
Wonderboy GETS sign language; he knows how to connect a sign to a spoken word to a thing or idea. He clicked with the concept of buh and puh immediately, just as soon as we turned the sounds into Real Things for him by giving them signs.
I missed a chance to go to a Visual Phonics training session last month, but I’ll share more about the program as I learn about it. It is primarily intended to help kids struggling with reading, but Gallaudet and other institutions have recognized its immense value in both reading and speech instruction for deaf/hard-of-hearing kids. I imagine Visual Phonics is going to be a big part of our lives these next few years, first in helping my boy learn to speak English, and later in helping him learn to read.
Buh buh brilliant. Also, buh buh bye—I’ve got to run or we’ll be late!
