infant "sign"

Sun Jan 9 14:50:40 UTC 2005

Dear All,

I have already bored Annette with a long account
of my late-talking grandson's use of sign as a
bridge to speech.  So, my non-scientific experience
tells me that baby sign enhanced his early output
(and that of several friends' grandchildren).

I'm trying to see in my mind how that fits with
Adele Abrahamsen's interesting idea of a bimodal
period.  It occurs to me that the statistics of
the same average amount of output at the same age for
the two modalities is not incompatible with the
now popular notion that baby sign creates a bridge
to speech.  If we consider that most hearing children
seem to drop the sign when speech becomes established,
then we would have a situation where early talkers
would go to speech and have X number of words at say
15 months and late talkers would also have similar
numbers of recorded signs at that time--but they
would have few or no words to their credit at that
point were it not for sign.  It seems to me the
comparison groups are "late talkers with signed
input" and "late talkers without signed input."
In that case, does signed input appear to help--
and then if there is a difference, which of
the various alternatives Adele mentions is the
most facilitative.

As for the relationship of the first and fifth
words, that may have been tricky for us to calculate
for my grandson as his first words were not
clearly referential, as his signs were.  So while
first and probably 5th signs did coincide in time
for him, he stayed at 5 words in speech and was
much more productive in sign.

Btw, we gave him the CDI at 15 months and he was
below the 5th percentile for production (counting
signs, which he hadn't started yet either) and
above the 95th for comprehension (and also right
around 50% on the First Words inventory). That's
my favorite image of "average": if someone has
one foot in boiling water and the other in freezing
water, on average you might say she is comfortable.
:)

Cheers,

Barbara Pearson

On Jan 9, 2005, at 7:25 AM, Adele Abrahamsen wrote:

> 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).
>>
> Hi, Annette, your inquirer might want to look at a 2000 book
> chapter in which I sought to integrate findings from studies
> involving three variations on bimodal input, especially:
> 1.  Acredolo and Goodwyn's invented symbolic gestures (baby
> signs);
> 2.  my own enhanced gestural input, in which signs borrowed
> from ASL accompany some of the words in the speech stream;
> 3.  ASL, based on studies by Folven and Bonvillian (not
> the situation you asked about, but it provides an informative
> comparison).
> I will use the term "symbolic gestures" for manual
> or bodily gestures or signs from a conventional signed
> language (such as ASL) that meet criteria of referential use.
> (References are at the end of this message)
>
> One point I emphasized in the chapter is that symbolic
> gestures and words are indistinguishable on some key measures,
> such as mean age (and even standard deviation) of first and
> fifth symbol.  Typically the first 5 to 15 or more symbols
> include gestures for some meanings and words for others.
> There are large individual differences -- some children have
> more gestures, others more words, others balanced -- but most
> important is that they are using both.
>
> Thus, symbolic gestures are not so much an early, preverbal
> SUBSTITUTE for words as an ADDITIONAL RESOURCE for children
> who are also communicating vocally.  Enhancing the amount and
> diversity of gestural input enables a larger total vocabulary
> of gestures and words through 1 1/2 years or so.  This is
> consistent with the idea that early symbolic and communicative
> development is bimodal, as emphasized since the 1970s by M. A.
> Halliday, Elizabeth Bates, Virginia Volterra, and others. I
> have observed the two modalities become increasingly
> coordinated after the earliest months (e.g., more overlap in
> vocabulary and simultaneous production), but then interest
> in symbolic gestures declines as speech accelerates. (Changes
> like this have been reported for nonsymbolic gestures such
> as pointing as well.)
>
> Another point that emerged from comparing these studies is
> that below 1 1/2 years or so, the amount and kind of
> gesture/sign input makes surprisingly little difference to the
> size of expressive vocabulary.  Children immersed in ASL from
> birth do acquire more by 1 1/2 years than children getting
> enhanced input, which typically involves mere dozens of extra
> (gestural)  symbols beginning around 11 months. However,
> despite this greatly disproportionate input in the manual
> modality, median vocabulary size in that modality differs only
> by a factor of about 2. I call this period of relatively slow
> growth, equipotentiality of modalities, and relative
> insensitivity to amount of input the "bimodal period." Much
> changes as it is left behind, a story told well by others but
> beyond the scope of the studies referenced below.
>
>> 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
>>
> I am indebted to Linda Acredolo and John Bonvillian not only
> for their important published work but also for supplying me
> with more detailed data from their studies.  Anyone seriously
> interested in the topic should, of course, not rely on my
> brief comments here but consult each research team's original
> reports.  They would not necessarily agree with everything I
> have said or with where I have placed emphasis. Much more
> detail about my methods for comparing the studies and
> additional conclusions are in the Abrahamsen (2000) chapter.
>
> I am also happy to address specific questions posed for
> which I have relevant data or experiences.
>
>
> REFERENCES
>
> Acredolo and Goodwyn -- References already sent by Diane
> Pesco and Margaret Friend in response to your inquiry;
> not repeated here.
>
> Abrahamsen, A. (2000). Explorations of enhanced gestural input
> to children in the bimodal period. In K. Emmorey and H. Lane
> (Eds.), The signs of language revisited: An anthology to honor
> Ursula Bellugi and Edward Klima (pp. 357-399). Hillsdale, NJ:
> Erlbaum.
>
> Abrahamsen, A. A., Lamb, M., Brown-Williams, J., & McCarthy,
> S. (1991). Boundary conditions on language emergence:
> Contributions from atypical learners and input. In P. Siple &
> S. Fischer (Eds.), Theoretical issues in sign language
> research. Volume 2: Psychology (pp. 231-254). Chicago:
> University of Chicago Press.
>
> Abrahamsen, A. A., Cavallo, M. M., & McCluer, J. A. (1985). Is
> the sign advantage a robust phenomenon? From gesture to
> language in two modalities. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly, 31,
> 177-209. [answer: no]
>
> Bonvillian, J. (1999), Sign language development.
> In M. Barrett (Ed.), The development of language.
> Studies in developmental psychology (pp. 277-310).
> New York: Psychology Press.
>
> Folven, R. J., and Bonvillian, J. D.
> (1993).  Sign language acquisition: Developmental aspects.
> In M. Marschark and M. D. Clark (Eds.).
> Psychological perspectives on deafness (pp. 229-265).
> Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
>
> Folven, R. J., and Bonvillian, J. D. (1991).
> The transition from nonreferential to referential language in
> children acquiring American Sign Language. Developmental
> Psychology. Vol 27(5), 806-816.
>
>
> --
> 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
>
>
*****************************************
Barbara Zurer Pearson, Ph.D
Research Associate, Project Manager
Dept. of Communication Disorders
University of Massachusetts
Amherst MA 01003

Tel: 413.545.5023
Fax: 413.545.0803

http://www.umass.edu/aae/