ASL for infants

[Onno Crasborn]

Mark Mandel wrote:

>I'll add a further aspect. Speech sounds very different to the speaker than
>it does to others, because we hear our own speech mostly through bone
>conduction. (Remember your reaction the first time you heard a playback of
>your own recorded voice?) It takes us time to learn to make the correction,
>and once we've mastered it we can never undo it. A couple of years ago I
>saw a report of some research on infant speech, in which intensive analysis
>of utterances of an infant of "prelingual" age revealed that the child
>actually was articulating words, but attempting to match what s/he heard
>s/her[dammit!]self saying to what he/she heard from the parents, without
>having yet mastered the correction. The corresponding confusion in sign
>production is easily observed and well attested in anecdotal evidence: the
>inversion of direction in orientation and motion so that the child makes
>their own view of their own hands as identical as possible to their view of
>their parents' hands.

David Corina questioned the 'sign mirror problem'. I'm also curious
about the claims for speech, which I haven't come across before.

Long before their first word stage, hearing children have had the
opportunity to get accustomed to the fact that every adult (or child)
they hear has a different voice. I can imagine that babies try to
mimic adults, but does the perception of their own speech really
hinder their speech development? If that's not the claim, then how
does the phenomenon fit in the discussion?

Onno Crasborn



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  Onno Crasborn
  o.a.crasborn at let.leidenuniv.nl
  http://www.leidenuniv.nl/hil/sign-lang/
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