hearing parents of deaf children please!

[Indith]

Please forgive me for crashing the special needs section but it would be great if you could answer a few questions for me.

I'm writing a beast of an essay on the language acquisition of deaf children of hearing parents (how their spoken lang acq differs from their hearing peers as well as gesture creation)

How do you find that your child's language differs from hearing peers?

What, if any, programmes ar you enrolled in?

Do you yourself sign and is your child learning BSL?

Has your child developed homesigns and have they developed to become different from the gestures you use with them?

If you have a hearing child and a deaf child at what age do you think their language began to differ from one another?

Virtual chocolate, hugs and kisses to anyone who responds!

[Indith]

bumpity bump

[stringbean]

I'm the hearing parent of a profoundly deaf 2 year old dd; she had a cochlear implant 8 months ago. Her language was probably similar to our ds (who's 5 and hearing) until about 7 or 8 months of age, inasmuch as she babbled, but then she became very quiet (the language wasn't being reinforced - I understand this pattern is pretty normal in deaf babies). Thinking about it, her language was mostly vowel sounds - oohs and aahs; we never had any b, d or g sounds from her (she did blow plenty of raspberries, but then so did ds). Her language has come on in leaps and bounds since the implant - she has around 50 words now (not all of them clear, but we know what she means!); her language is probably that of a 16-18 month old hearing child. Obviously, her speech and language is extremely delayed compared to that of children her own age. She still makes a lot of vowel sounds - the consonants are slower to come, probably because they are higher pitched and therefore harder for her to hear (although, with the implant, she should be able to access all speech sounds).

We sign with dd and always have done, although I understand we're quite unusual in this respect; lots of families use gesture and a few signs, but we've really tried to give dd the opportunity to develop a large signing vocabulary. I started with baby-signing/Makaton, but have recently incorporated a lot of BSL as I have started a BSL course in the past 6 months. Dd has a huge signing vocabulary, and still signs a lot to us - it's her first language - but usually says the word if she knows it, as well as making the sign (which has helped us to work out what she's saying). She doesn't sign in BSL sign order - it's really SSE; it's recommended at this age as it will be easier for her when she starts to learn to read. I do want her to keep up her signing if possible, but this is largely dependent on her, and whether we can find signing peers for her as she gets older.

She also has weekly auditory-verbal therapy, which is encouraging her to use words and expand her vocabulary (as well as giving us some pointers to help her do this). It means a lot of concentration for her during the sessions - we both find it really tiring! She's obviously starting to lip-read too - you can see her looking at your mouth, trying to imitate the same shape and movements. Not sure what you mean by homesigns, I'm afraid.

Hope this helps.

[stringbean]

She's actually 2 years 6 months.

[Indith]

Thankyou! Any more?

Homesigns refers to any made up signs you might use as a family but ar not part of BSL or any sign supported English system.

[stringbean]

Oh, I see. The only made up signs we have are for dd's and ds's names, but we made them up, as opposed to dd coming up with them (ds suggested dd's signing name, and our ToD suggested ds's). If you have any more questions, please ask.

[Indith]

Will do thanks