12 Comments »

• brianriley4 says:

  September 30, 2007 at 2:00 am

  You misunderstood Jamie Berke. She wasn’t talking about whether learning sign language causes speech to be *delayed*, but instead she was talking about whether there is some kind of substantial cognitive impairment caused to a child’s *ability* to learn speech if that child learns sign language first.

  It makes perfect sense to study hearing children to see whether this is true or not, because it’s a generalized biological question about the human body and its functioning.
• Paula Rosenthal says:

  September 30, 2007 at 6:49 am

  Thank you for your comments. If you read Jamie’s FAQ page here: http://deafness.about.com/od/babysigning/f/signspeech.htm she does not discuss anything about “substantial cognitive impairment caused to a child’s ‘ability’ to learn speech if that child learns sign language first.”

  If you read the study it says, “The results of the present study, particularly the comparisons between the Sign Training group and the Non-intervention Control group, strongly support the hypothesis that symbolic gesturing facilitates the early stages of verbal language development.” As I said in my post, I do not disagree with the findings of this study, but it cannot be applied to language development in children with hearing loss since all the children in the study had normal hearing.

  I stand by my statements.
• Mother of bilingual deaf and hearing children says:

  September 30, 2007 at 8:30 am

  I respectfully disagree with your statement, “A research study using only children with normal hearing cannot be indicative of outcomes of language development in children with hearing loss.” In this case, the study involved exposure to one spoken language and one signed language. It was a study about bilingualism – two languages. Babies have an innate capacity to acquire more than one language when those babies have access to those languages are in their environment.

  From research that shows that hearing babies benefit from early exposure to sign language, I can infer that babies who are deaf or hard of hearing benefit from early exposure to sign language. This inference is even stronger for babies who are deaf or hard of hearing because their access to the spoken language in their environment may be delayed or limited.

  Within months of her birth, I learned that my child was deaf. I did everything I could to maximize her access to the spoken language in her environment and to develop her listening and speaking skills. I also did everything I could to put a fully accessible language into her environment by learning and using sign language. In the early years, the degree to which my child could hear, learn to listen, or learn to speak was unknown and unclear. Into this world of uncertainty, I also chose to do something that was guaranteed to provide my child with at least one language and the communication skills necessary for age appropriate cognitive, social, and emotional development.

  When I see hearing babies benefiting from sign language, I cannot ignore the inference that deaf or hard of hearing babies would benefit from sign language, too.
• MKChaikof says:

  September 30, 2007 at 10:22 am

  I have two daughters with bilateral cochlear implants, ages 20 and 12. Both learned to hear and speak through the Auditory-Verbal approach. For me, that meant immersing them in spoken English all day every day, just as young hearing children learn a foreign language best in immersion programs. Any time that I would have spent teaching them signs would have taken away from the time I spent teaching them spoken language.

  My older daughter was always very visual. Today, she has channeled that into working toward a career in art and photography. Strangers would even come up to me and comment on her visual alertness when she was a baby riding in the stroller. Because she was one of the earlier CI children, she was not implanted until age two and a half. By that time, she had become an excellent lipreader. It took us six months to switch her English vocabulary over from the visual to the auditory through something we came up with on our own but that is now referred to as auditory sandwiching, where we would give her just the auditory of what we were saying, then let her lipread it, then say it again. How confusing to a child who is just learning to tune into her new hearing would it have been to have also added signs! Learning to listen was something she needed to work on. It wasn’t something that started for her in utero as it does for normal hearing babies. Because she was naturally visual and because understanding through the auditory did not come as easily for her, she would have used the sign as a crutch and not have fully developed the auditory portion of her brain during her critical early years, and researchers have proven that the first few years of life are critical for developing the auditory portion of the brain.

  Today, she hears and speaks beautifully and excelled academically throughout high school and in her first year in college. I have no doubt that this is because she had the appropriate early intervention.
• brianriley4 says:

  September 30, 2007 at 10:57 am

  You are taking the original remarks out of context and attempting to apply a context that was not intended. The original discussion had nothing to do with the concept of speech being delayed, but rather it had to do with the capacity to acquire speech.
• mother says:

  September 30, 2007 at 3:44 pm

  Funny you should ask about this! I just added the following to my kids’ website FAQ:

  “What about babysigns? Can’t hurt, right? Isn’t there research showing it to be helpful?

  There are 1 or 2 studies (small) regarding babysigns. They were NOT studying children who were profoundly deaf. In a nutshell, hearing babies are hearing the entire time that the few dozen signs are being used, so perhaps it does not delay their language development, though it might delay expressive somewhat. Unfortunately, these studies are being utilized to criticize parents who have not used sign with their deaf infants. There is no literature to suggest that deaf infants born to hearing parents will benefit from use of sign language prior to implantation or after implantation. In fact, there is plenty of research which suggests that rewiring the brain in this way (visually) may make it permanently more difficult to learn to speak and use English grammar well. Since most deaf infants are born to hearing parents, it is important that their children learn a complex language very early, which is impossible for them to do in ASL.

  from Newsweek magazine:

  At 20 months, children of chatty mothers averaged 131 more words than children of less talkative mothers; at 2 years, the gap had more than doubled, to 295 words. “The critical factor is the number of times the child HEARS (emphasis mine) different words,” says Huttenlocher. The effect holds for the complexity of sentence structure, too, she finds. Mothers who used COMPLEX sentences (those with dependent clauses, such as “when…” or “because…”) 40 percent of the time had toddlers who did so 35 percent of the time; mothers who used such sentences in only 10 percent of their utterances had children who did so only 5 percent of the time.” -Sharon Begley, from “How to Build a Baby’s Brain”

  Remember, deaf children are born with the same capabilities and abilities for language and complex thought as any other child, but their development can be hampered IF they do not get complex language. This is the reason that, for many years, a small number of deaf children who were born into ASL using families outperformed the majority of deaf kids who were born to hearing families. The hearing families could choose to do one of two things– either use sign language (poorly– most could not use complex sentences) or use speech when it was more difficult for the child. Today’s family does not have the same difficulty if their child’s hearing loss is detected early. Take a look around at deaf blogs to see how difficult English language still is for older, deaf adults. ”

  Jamie Berke’s web entries are in a section of about.com which is dedicated to the subject of deafness, and people who read it will assume that the study is referring to studies of deaf infants. I think it is highly misleading. While people have the freedom to choose whether to sign or speak or do both with their children, those in the Deaf Culture should not oppressively try to coerce parents to use sign because they think we ought to. Jamie’s post was just one more of many blogs which try to lash out at us parents and our choices. It is not their choice; it is ours. Babysign is not only NOT what we would have to do if we were choosing to sign with our deaf infants (we would have to learn a complete language such as ASL in the U.S.) but it is a very poor comparison to the situation facing hearing parents who find that their child is hearing impaired.
• rox says:

  October 1, 2007 at 10:53 pm

  MKChaikov,
  You said “Any time that I would have spent teaching them signs would have taken away from the time I spent teaching them spoken language.” But the opposite can be said as well: Any time that would be spent teaching them to speak and hear would take away from the time that is spent learning ASL.

  My mom still brags that I’m an excellent lipreader. It just won’t sink into her head that I don’t lipread all that well, and even the best lipreaders only catch 60% of what is being said. I hope you aren’t as blind as my mother is. Your daughter is an excellent guesser.

  I am curious as to why, if your daughter was a natural visual learner, why you would make her life so much more difficult by forcing her to switch over and learn everything auditorily? Why didn’t you go with her strengths and use a visual language? The fact that people use sign as a crutch is a myth. There are many ASL users that still speak today.

  I have no doubt that your daughter is developing wonderfully. I just have to wonder about the decisions that you made and why you would make your daughter’s life so much more difficult than it already is.
• MKChaikof says:

  October 2, 2007 at 6:11 am

  But I didn’t make her life more difficult. I made it much easier because today she is living in the entire world and not in just one small piece of it. She can hear and speak beautifully and so can communicate easily with everyone. Furthermore, we took advantage of her young age when she was two and a half when she first got her CI and taught her to learn to make sense of her CI hearing at an age when her brain still had the flexibility to do so. That she was able to become totally auditory in only 6 months post-CI is evidence of that. Perhaps you should read what she herself has to say about the path we chose for her. This is from her website, http://www.cochlearimplantonline.com:

  ” While my sister and I have been raised in the hearing world, our deafness will always be part of us, but it does not define who we are. Nearly 30 years after the revolution of the cochlear implant, the debate of using sign language is still endless. Deaf advocates are taking advantage of the cyberworld by using blogs to advocate that babies with cochlear implants and even normal hearing babies use sign language starting as newborns. They believe that deaf infants who start learning sign language as soon as possible will have better expressive language than children with cochlear implants who do not learn sign language. As a 20 year old adult, I firmly prove these deaf advocates wrong because I do not regret that I have not learned sign language. I feel that ASL is absolutely unnecessary to be part of my life as I am leading a rich life in which I hear and speak well. I graduated from high school with honors and am now a sophomore at a regular mainstream college.

  Many people have been fooled into thinking that I am not deaf because my speech is clear and also because I hear well. This is to thanks to all the years that I worked in Auditory-Verbal therapy where my therapist and family taught me to listen and speak. “
• MKChaikof says:

  October 3, 2007 at 12:19 pm

  One more comment for rox – Your comment that my daughter is “an excellent guesser” is indicative of your lack of knowledge about what the true potential is for children implanted early and taught language auditorally. In the booth with absolutely no visual cues, my daughter scores 100% auditory comprehension. She is not an exception. This is very typical of deaf children raised as my daughter was. This kind of hearing opens up the world for these children. At 60%, they struggle. at the levels at which they are performing, they do not.
• rox says:

  October 4, 2007 at 9:13 pm

  MKChaikof, it’s hard to compare a life of a CI and a life of an ASL user, because one often does not experience both. I, however grew up oral, mainstreamed and was very happy with myself until I was a sophomore in an Ivy League University. I transferred to Gallaudet, and when I learned how accessible my world could be, I was so disappointed that I had been missing out on this much all my life!? I had struggled and overcame challenges all this time, when it could have been made so much easier!? All this time I thought I could communicate easily despite my barriers, only to find that I really do struggle to understand a lot.

  “today she is living in the entire world and not in just one small piece of it.” Wow, so am I, and so are many other ASL users. I don’t understand your point.

  If your daughter truly feels that sign language is not necessary for her, fine. I’m sick of seeing students come into my class when they are eleven, twelve, or thirteen years old, and they still don’t have a language. When I ask about their history, and find out they were implanted at a young age, tried to teach speech and auditory training for 10 years, and transferred from school to school before the parents finally decided to try sign language, and by that time, it is far too late to develop their language skills to their potential. Do you really want to encourage a parent to do this to their child?

  Your daughter and I have SO much in common. I scored 100% on auditory comprehension as well, without any visual cues. Too bad the whole world doesn’t speak through a microphone with a headphone and say a limited vocabulary like: baseball, hotdog, airplane over and over and over.
• MKChaikof says:

  October 5, 2007 at 12:13 pm

  It was actually not on the simple test that you speak of that she scored 100%. It is on a test of connected language read off a tape recorder, which is even a less clear signal than a live voice. My younger daughter, who is 12, actually scores 100% on the hardest test of 25 – 50 single syllable words, some of which she has absolutely no prior experience with. In addition, when she finished her A-V therapy at age 6, she had language that tested age level to two years above. She was implanted at age 15 months.

  The main point, though, is that both of my girls function very well and very happily in the mainstream world as do so many other CI children, young adults now actually, whom I know. The only time my daughters use ALDs is in school when they use a portable soundfield system. They watch TV and movies without captioning with my younger daughter actually picking up new vocabulary from cartoons when she was little. They also speak on the phone without using their telecoils.

  I don’t know why the kids you have come into contact with haven’t succeeded in hearing as well as my daughters, but I would suggest that you should not base your opinion only on them, for they actually constitute a minority of those children implanted young with CIs. There are thousands more who are succeeding and so who would never make their way to you.

  What I would encourage a parent to do is to have their profoundly deaf child implanted bilaterally at as early an age as possible and then find a good certified Auditory-Verbal therapist who can teach them, as my girl’s therapist did, to make all of life a language learning and language enriching experience. With the hearing that the CIs give them, combined with their young and still very flexible brains and the immersion in spoken English, most will thrive.
• Jill B says:

  October 28, 2009 at 8:32 pm

  I would like to remind you that speech and language, though connected, are different. ASL is a language as much as english, spanish and french are. I find it hard to believe that it is being argued that learning one language is hindering one from learning another. Anyone who has taken forign language could tell you that understanding a language and speaking it can be two different things. What is being argued here is speech and auditory comprehension.

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