Gee, I thought that lipreading was a "crutch"!

Grayma said:
Babies who are signed to 'babble' in hand shapes. Deaf babies do it more, but both of my youngest hearing grandbabies see me and start waving their hands around, trying to make different hand movements (because I am the one signs most consistently with them).
Did you see the link I posted in the family section about the Chinese boys who were adopted by a family with one deaf and one hearing parent? She has a video on her blog of the boys doing this sign language babbling, and she explains hwo this helps them learn speech.

Lipreading helps hearing babies pick up the mechanics of speech and it's the same thing deaf babies do when they watch their parents sign, then make seemingly random hand movements for awhile before making signs that can be understood. In both cases, it helps them pick up the mechanics of sign. It's the same developmental step, hearing or deaf.
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Interesting. You mean there comes a moment of epiphany for the babies later when something "clicks" and they go "AH-HAH!! So THAT'S what I've been saying!"? Are you sure? Just wondering.
 
shel90 said:
They cover their mouths when talking to the..these poor babies are striving for as much language input as they can only to get some of it taken away for the sake of learning to "hear." Incredibly audist of them
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Tell me about it. AVT has to be the most fucked up philosophy ever. Have you ever read the Listen-Up site where they really push it? It's all "it's not just a philosphy! It's a LIFESTYLE!" And her son is all into the whole therapy as lifestyle? I find both the mouth cue and the whole philsophy behind AVT extremely fucked up......"you must assimulate into the hearing world, your kid must live life as a speech therapy session." etc.
 
Beowulf said:
Interesting. You mean there comes a moment of epiphany for the babies later when something "clicks" and they go "AH-HAH!! So THAT'S what I've been saying!"? Are you sure? Just wondering.
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The lipreading and the babbling are developmental steps toward the combined skills of the mechanics and the understanding for language. I just read an article about this in the last few months, and I am trying to find it again. I've found these instead:

Researchers have found that they can identify the language base of a baby's family before the baby learns to talk:
Here they can tell from the babbling what language a child has been exposed to after only five hours.
there's a definite difference in the babbling sounds between babies who speak different languages once exposed to speech a very short while.

Most of the studies I've read on babbling are focused on hearing babies. It would be cool to see similar studies for deaf babies from signing families, and it looks like that work has been done and collected in the book [ame="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743247132/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&tag=cmasonideas-20&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0743247132"]Talking Hands, What Sign Language Reveals About the Mind[/ame]. Here's a quote from about page 65 to 66:
“The babbling has a linguistic purpose. At first, babies produce a wide range of speech sounds, including those not found in the language of the home…. Over time, as the infant gains more exposure to her mother tongue, these ‘foreign’ sounds disappear, and her babbling falls in line with those sounds actually present in the adult language around her. Linguists regard the babbling stage as a kind of extended phonological rehearsal… in which, from the set of all possible speech sounds, the infant gradually homes in on the particularly subset she’ll actually need. As it turns out, exactly the same thing happens with deaf infants exposed to sign as a first language, only here the babbling is manual. Using their hands and fingers, these deaf babies rehearse a wide range of ‘nonsense’ gestures. Over time, they unconsciously zero in on the set of meaningful gestures in the particular sign language to which they are exposed. Like the verbal babbling of hearing babies, the manual babbling of deaf babies, seemingly random at first, gradually tailors itself fo the linguistic demands of the babbler’s native language.”​
[in this case, sign].

Both hearing and deaf babies babble about the same way at first. Gradually deaf babies quit the oral babbling, but if signed to, they continue to develop language the same way and the same pace (except I think faster in the first stages in particular), nonsense babbling (or so it appears), more definite babbling (manual or oral), and then words- as all human infants in the entire world. It's really pretty cool.


I think several things happen- they understand what they want to say, and they lipread to figure out the mechanics of how to say what they want to say. it's obvious babies understand far more than they can actually say- My two year old son could not speak, but if we asked him which of his cars was the biggest, the smallest, the second largest, the yellow one, etc. he knew and would show us. Deaf babies sign their first word months before hearing babies speak their first word, because sign is easier for a baby to do than forming a word orally. How do they learn the mechanics of saying/signing the word if not by watching to see how it is done?
That's what I do as an adult- when my friend is teaching me a new sign I copy her. She laughs and says no, and signs it again, and I watch her closely, copy her again.
I did this in my Japanese class, too, lipread carefully to figure out how to make my mouth form the sounds.

They also have parents imitating what the baby says, and then often say the word the babbling most sounds like, "Oh, you said baba, do you mean you want the bottle?" or whatever. The baby watches the parent's face closely, and collects information- and words with understanding follow- signed or spoken.

I'm not really sure what your point of disagreement is? Can you explain your reasons for thinking lipreading has nothing to do with the development of speech? Babies watch the mouths of speaking people carefully, and they watch the hands of signing people carefully. Both are useful for developing communication skills.
 
Grayma, I am not really disagreeing with anything. I was just curious, because I became deaf when I was two. I was already talking by then, and I am sure I watched with fascination the way people's lips moved. I am certain I became a good lipreader soon after, most likely with simple sentences within the structure of the family. It wasn't until a couple years later that I began formal speech training (and lipread training, I think). That was in the mid-fifties, and those dreary memories are best forgotten.
 
Beowulf said:
Grayma, I am not really disagreeing with anything. I was just curious, because I became deaf when I was two. I was already talking by then, and I am sure I watched with fascination the way people's lips moved. I am certain I became a good lipreader soon after, most likely with simple sentences within the structure of the family. It wasn't until a couple years later that I began formal speech training (and lipread training, I think). That was in the mid-fifties, and those dreary memories are best forgotten.
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Ah, Ok.

One of the interesting things in one of the papers was that babies watch their parents intently all over at first. Then they switch to focusing on their mouths (obviously, for speaking parents). Once they start babbling the 'correct' syllables (even though they probably don't consciously know they are correct, or maybe they do), they quit focusing on the mouths. But- and this is so cool to me- when a person speaking a foreign language shows up, within a very short time, the babies go back to focusing on that person's mouth.

Sorry. What's going on in their adorable little heads just fascinates me.
 
shel90 said:
They cover their mouths when talking to the..these poor babies are striving for as much language input as they can only to get some of it taken away for the sake of learning to "hear." Incredibly audist of them
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That is horrible!

I am hearing and I often can not figure out what people are saying to me unless I can see their mouth!
 
Grayma said:
Ah, Ok.

One of the interesting things in one of the papers was that babies watch their parents intently all over at first. Then they switch to focusing on their mouths (obviously, for speaking parents). Once they start babbling the 'correct' syllables (even though they probably don't consciously know they are correct, or maybe they do), they quit focusing on the mouths. But- and this is so cool to me- when a person speaking a foreign language shows up, within a very short time, the babies go back to focusing on that person's mouth.

Sorry. What's going on in their adorable little heads just fascinates me.
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I agree that it is fascinating!

There is a lot of reasoning going on in an infants brain that adults have a hard time understanding since their abilities seem so limited. The amount of brain function is truly incredible. Especially since it seems that many adults have such a difficult time learning new things ... there is just so much that gets "set" and things to un-learn.

Umm, I might not be making sense. If so, I apologize!
 
AlleyCat said:
Why would that be?
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When there is background noise, I can not focus on the sounds only coming from the speaker, and there is almost always some kind of background noise.

I do not know if it is that I can not focus, or if I just don't hear very well. I would suspect it is a little of both.
 
RedCoyotesRose said:
When there is background noise, I can not focus on the sounds only coming from the speaker, and there is almost always some kind of background noise.

I do not know if it is that I can not focus, or if I just don't hear very well. I would suspect it is a little of both.
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I wonder if you have even a mild loss. With my HAs, I can only hear the loudest sound in the room, whatever that may be. So if you have a hard time focusing on multiple sounds, that makes me curious. No ill-will intended.
 
AlleyCat said:
I wonder if you have even a mild loss. With my HAs, I can only hear the loudest sound in the room, whatever that may be. So if you have a hard time focusing on multiple sounds, that makes me curious. No ill-will intended.
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Ill will? Blinks... I can not even imagine where I could have interpreted any ill will in anything you said!

A mild loss would be my guess. I don't tend to notice a loss but I work form home and spend most of time time with the same people day in and day out.
It is very difficult to hear people while sitting int he hot tub.
And people do tell me that I speak loudly when I do not think I am.
At the same time, hearing is one of the senses I still rely on greatly.

In fact, that leads me to one of the things that crossed my mind with the original post in this thread. Why would it be good to focus on any one sense?

Why focus only on hearing, only on sight, only on touch, only on smell, only on taste? Our experiences are all crafted of all of our sensory input. Shouldn't we use every possible way we each have to be bale to truly experience everything?
 
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