Last night Peter finally signed MOMMY! It was a hand wiggle with his thumb on the side of his chin, but he was looking at a picture of me :D. He has sort of made signs for Sydney and Samantha, and DADDY and GRANDMA, and BABY, so we are slowly getting all the family members. I still rated after DOG, CAT, and FISH, though! He even signed GRASS last Friday before he signed MOMMY. I hope he says "mama" before those other words to make up for it!
DADDY
I heard from another mom who went to a CI conference that the professionals were recommending not introducing any new signs after a child gets an implant, at least until spoken language is established. IF I wanted to stick hard and fast to those guidelines I could still talk to Peter when his CIs are off, BUT only because I exposed Peter to so many signs that even if I don't teach him any new ones, he has hundreds that we could still use!. One small study touting benefits of early signing showed CI kids with deaf parents did better learning spoken language than CI kids with hearing parents- the assumption being that the signing from birth gave them early access to language, which ported over to spoken language. This study is pretty old, before the FDA lowered the implant age guidelines, and it doesn't have any hearing parents who signed. Another old (1996) study showed that continued development in sign did not have a negative effect on spoken language, and possibly had a positive effect. The authors of the study also point out that people who posit that signing is detrimental tend to be monolingual, where most of the world is bi-, or multi-lingual, and that they develop just fine! I keep this information in the back of mind when I feel pressure to drop signing. I also know that signing is not for every family- we had a head start because I had used it with my girls. People who have late diagnosed kids, or whose children lose their hearing suddenly may not even have time to think about learning sign before their child has CI's and they are focusing on talking talking talking! And if the FDA lowers the age guidelines to 9 months for CI surgery then there will be even less time to focus on sign- but that doesn't mean it wouldn't help....
But what is the magic formula? Several studies seem to show that CI Children in Oral programs speak and understand spoken language better than CI Children in Total Communication programs. Is it that TC is not the best of both worlds, and immersion in each separately would be more beneficial? Where are those studies? What would I even look for? I suppose it doesn't really matter right now, as I already knew I wanted to do an oral school at this point, but still use sign. We have times like bedtime, where we read some stories aloud, with some signs on the book, then take off the CI and have a 100% signed story or two. Peter seems pretty happy with that arrangement :)
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