infant "sign" -chapter pdf, archived discussions

[Adele Abrahamsen]

Dear All,

Annette Karmiloff-Smith's Jan 8 inquiry elicited some
interesting questions about using invented or borrowed signs
with babies -- what I also call enhanced gesturing or,
following Goodwyn and Acredolo, symbolic gesturing.  In
particular, Barbara Pearson brought up the role of these
symbols as a bridge to speech (I'd add that the opposite can
also occur), the importance of this to late talkers,
and a pattern in which a late talker's words were primarily
nonreferential. Others have raised practical questions
about the possible unnaturalness of enhanced gesturing and
whether it might mitigate the "terrible twos" (if only...).

I did not address these questions in my own reply on Jan 9,
but some of them have been discussed previously on
info-childes: to my knowledge, in January 1999, March-April
2000, and May 2002. For the convenience of anyone wanting to read
these exchanges -- and to remind everyone how useful the
info-childes archives can be --  they can be accessed directly at
http://listserv.linguistlist.org/archives/info-childes.html, or
by following the mailing list menu at http://linguistlist.org,
or using the link at http://childes.psy.cmu.edu/html/email.html.
I have verified that the following search string, typed into
the search box for Subject (second box down) will retrieve all
25 messages:  sign and (infant or bab or hearing or talker).

In one of these 25 messages, posted 3/25/00, I addressed some
of the practical issues. There is also a follow-up Q & A
message that is not in the archive, and recently my initial
reply to Barbara Pearson (which I did not post to the list). I
would be happy to forward any of these on request.

The book chapter that was the focus of my 1/9/05 reply to
Annette's query is a longer, more academic exploration of
what enhanced gesturing findings tell us about the
bimodal period (c. 12-19 months). It can be accessed as
a PDF file by pasting into your browser:
http://mechanism.ucsd.edu/~adele/abrahamsen_enhancedgesture.pdf

I hope that these suggestions, along with the references and
URLs sent in several peoples' postings Jan 8-10, are helpful
to anyone wanting to inquire further into this topic.

Best wishes, Adele Abrahamsen


On Sat, 8 Jan 2005, Professor Annette Karmiloff-Smith wrote:

> I have been asked to find out what serious sceintific studies have
> been done on the effects of teaching hearing infants to use "signs"
> (I am not talking about the real language, ASL or BSL, but a list of
> lexical signs taught to "advance infant communication skills" before
> they are able to vocalise).
>
> I'd appreciate refs, abstracts of refs, of scientific studies, as
> well as any personal experiences.
> Rather urgent please.
> Many thanks, and HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL,
> Annette K-S
>
--
Dr. Adele Abrahamsen
Center for Research in Language
University of California, San Diego
9500 Gilman Drive, 0526
La Jolla, CA 92093-0526

Office telephone: 858-822-1941
Office location:  7023 HSS

Email:  adele at crl.ucsd.edu

Homepage:  mechanism.ucsd.edu/~adele
Inquiry website:  inquiry.ucsd.edu