Say It, Sign It
It might sound odd, but I can’t say exactly how old Charlie was when he started to talk. He had a few sounds as a one-year-old and one sound (”dah”) when he was two. We had to teach him to imitate us speaking. But, even though Charlie understood our instruction “do this, buh!,” he at first was simply not able to move the muscles of his mouth and tongue to say the same sound that he did. Many years of speech therapy, ABA, and lots of physical activity have helped Charlie’s articulation and he can now pronounce most sounds accurately (though the l sounds tends to come out as w—-”later” is “waiter” and “lie down” is “fwie down”), with some effort.
When Charlie was younger, we first tried to teach him PECS but he struggled to identify the pictures. One of his first ABA therapists was in graduate school to become a speech language pathologist and was studying sign language and offered to teach Charlie some simple signs. She modified the signs to make them easy for Charlie, whose gross and fine motor skills were delayed; it only took a session to teach Charlie to ask for a potato chip or his favorite rice cracker. It became clear to me that it was not that Charlie did not want to talk. Charlie’s urge to communicate was evident, but he was not able to make the sounds and to connect them to the thoughts in his head. Even when Charlie started to imitate speech sounds (it would be some time before he was able to imitate whole words), we kept teaching him modified signs (over the objections of our then-ABA consultant), in order to provide him with as many ways to try to communicate as we might.
We only started to teach Charlie to use sign language back in 1999 at the suggestion of the speech/ABA therapist. Since then, I’ve heard much more about programs (such as those using verbal behavior) that draw on sign language. An article in the December 12th Los Angeles Times notes that clinical child psychologist Esther Hess and Etel Leit, a language specialist and founder of SignShine, are writing a book on using sign language to help autistic children communicate. They see sign language as especially helping children to communicate their emotions:
Leit explained that sight is the strongest sense in children with autism. Sign language allows them to rely on this strength while reducing their reliance on weaker audio-verbal senses.
Just as they do with the deaf, practitioners working with autistic youngsters always speak aloud as they sign to promote speech, the ultimate goal.
But with deaf kids, signing is all about filling in the lack of verbal communication. Among children with autism, using signs is about emotional communication, a challenge for those afflicted with the spectrum disorder.
Hess described her work with a young boy with autism who’d been hitting his twin sister and had been thrown out of three nursery schools. With speech underscoring her use of baby sign language, Hess asked the boy to describe his emotional state.
“He stopped and looked at me and said `I’m squeaky,”‘ Hess recalled. “Then we had a place to go.
“Children do negative behaviors because their body doesn’t feel good. So signing permits them to have a validation and feel they are understood.”
I found signing helpful to Charlie, before he could really talk too much, as helpful for any kind of communication, and not only emotional. I’ll speculate (very quickly!) that, for some children, a sign might say a feeling or motion more quickly when a child feels overwhelmed and it is hard to talk. The college where I teach has begun to offer American Sign Language and students can take it for their foreign language credit: I’ll flap both hands for that.
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POSTED IN: Language, Psychology
7 opinions for Say It, Sign It
Leanne
Dec 13, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Patrick’s preschool teacher taught all the children (and myself as well since I attended with him) sign language. She used if often when she spoke and especially at circle when they were counting, doing weather, etc. I still love her for it. We still use some of the signs if Patrick has blocked us out, or if I need him to sit down but he’s not within hearing distance.
Daisy
Dec 13, 2007 at 8:50 pm
Ah, but what to do for the child with Asperger’s who is also blind?
kyra
Dec 13, 2007 at 9:12 pm
i’ll flap along with you! i’ve always loved ASL. it’s such a beautiful and expressive language; i can see how it might be easily to grab hold of a gesture that can capture a moment far more easily than linking together a bunch of abstract words.
Kristina Chew, PhD
Dec 13, 2007 at 10:32 pm
Daisy, this might sound kind of odd—-but I have wondered about Braille and books with raised letters. In the sense of wondering if Charlie being able to touch and feel the letters would at all help him with reading—touch and smell are two senses that he seems to use a lot in perceiving the world.
We’ll have to flap together some time—
livsparents
Dec 13, 2007 at 11:09 pm
We can relate about the comment about not knowing when Liv started talking, we’re in the midst of that right now, where we need to take the first letter, consanant, or syllable as the word. She’s got it, she gets it all the way with the whole word with ‘pop outs’ occasionally, but we need to encourage any attempt at communication. From a sound, to a PECS picture, to dragging us into the next room by our index finger…
Marla
Dec 13, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Where I grew up in Iowa you could take sign as a foreign language credit. It was great. Since I took it for a few years at that young age I remember a lot of it. Maizie knows some sign but when she was younger she did not use it. She refused most forms of communication and certainly did use aggression as a major form of communication in regards to how she was feeling. Once we taught her language using the Lindamood Bell system her aggression went way down. It took so long and lots of money that we could not really afford. Which leads to your post above.
Skov
Dec 14, 2007 at 8:57 am
Although definitely not the way to learn ASL, we’ve found a lot of success in supplementing with instructional videos. The one Logan (and his younger brother) like best are the Signing Time series.
http://www.signingtime.com/
They’re short, sweet, full of simple animation and charming (almost too catchy) songs. Just wanted to give them a shout-out because they’ve made a huge difference in our house.
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