Language Developement (by sarah)
Alaric is putting me to shame with Mary and teaching her lojban - Jeany and him have been learning this for a year or so - Jean is a bit erratic with it but evenings often find them both 'cooking' dinner and talking via laptop to the lojban community. With him raising Mary bilingual and him writing poems for WoPoWriMo in the language things are moving streaks ahead.
This does cause me a few problems in that Jean has a tendency to ask me what things are lojban when Daddy's not here which can be interesting but via the internet I have been able to help abit.
I really wanted to give my children the chance of being good at languages incase it was something they either wanted or needed when they grew up. This meant that when Jean was a baby I spent alot of time getting language tapes to play to her - I tried to get non European languages as they tend to be the least similar to English and therefore harder to learn for native English speakers. The first year of a baby's developement is very important as that is when they absorb into their little brains all the sounds of their native language.
There are sounds that adults can not hear in other languages which is why it is one of the reasons it is so hard to learn as an adult. Now I have had arguments with people about doing this - being told it would impede Jean's linguistic development but everything I had read in the research suggested that though being exposed to other languages may result in the child speaking a bit later - they would be capable of a) understanding the syntax and the actual structure of languages better and b) they would do much better in picking up other languages in future.
Not being able to get hold of everything I wanted with Jeany and being told by Al's family that the tapes would not be giving her all the higher sounds and stuff - I used to play music to her - a wide variety of styles - as wide as I could. Musicians tend to be able to hear those sounds in the other languages even if they can not reproduce them, now standard European music on has tones and semi-tones and so is quiet limited for this but stuff like Indian music has micro-tones and covers a wider range of sounds.
I even had a copy of the Koran being sang which my friend sent us.
The result of all of this? Is Jean a fantastic linguist? Well no but she has already suprised us and her teachers by appearing to be not interested in French leasons and then in the middle of supermarkets splurting out chunks of it which in like her first term when she'd only just turned four included counting one to ten in French - she can count the same in Lojban too.
Interestingly one of the things she is very good at is remembering tunes - not perfectly but more than would be expected for a five year old. Now this may well be genetic - I tend to remember a song 'roughly' from one hearing and infact can even sometimes start singing along during the first hearing (this works best with say hymns or pop music - both of which tend to repeat huge chunks of themselves).
She is also picking up guitar stuff faster than I thought she would! She has rhythm which we already knew from her dancing 🙂
(yes I know but I am a gushy proud parent!)
Sadly I lost most of the language tapes and CD's in the flood and the MP3's when my laptop died so I need to start from stratch with Mary - though with Alric and Jean speaking Lojban maybe it's not as needed.
The other thing I did was teach Jeany baby sign - she never learnt more than a few signs but she did understood more and on top of that has remembered them! To be fair I have stopped using 'wait' though it is a mangeled version using one hand as I found I never had two hands free whilst dealing with children and often I am on the phone or eating so can not vocalise a response!
I had wanted to develope it into proper sign language but unfortunatly we didn't have enough money for me to attend the course and the books on it where all quiet expensive - I know a little bit anyway like the alphabet and the names of school subjects. But I do have a slight problem in that baby sign British Sign Language and Mackatain (not sure of the spelling) are all different and I know bits of all of them :/
Again baby sign is very good for linguistic developement - not because it gets your baby talking quicker because it doesn't - but it improves the level at which the child starts to speak - so they are lickely to vocalise later on but they will be talking in sentences!
Baby sign was fantastic for preventing frustrated baby with Jean as well becuase even before she could of physically started speaking she was signing milk! at us. She learnt Milk first followed by poo - later we had more, yummy, wet, thirsty and hurt (followed by pointing to where) - this was also invaluable when it came to potty training 😉 She also made up her own signs like milk! with both hands - this meant she wanted food!
People always comment on how well Jean speaks - plus baby sign helps them develope fine motor movements and hey you have to spend a lot of time with your baby so it's not really like it was much extra effort. Sign languages are good in that though they are the languages that pick up the most dialects or regional variations they are also the languages in which people can all communicate and work out what the other person is saying! They are far more versatile - which is why I personally am sticking to sign language and not learning Lojban with Al and Jean.
I was keen on sign language again due to the issue of my own hearing when I was small - just in case - fortunatly Jean has good hearing (except when you are telling her off!). I think by the end of that first year my friends were sick of being handed a baby Jean and asked to 'speak foreign' 🙂 Oh and we always watch DVD's in the other languages as well as English 🙂
Sat 12th Feb 2011 11:30 am 
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By Rachel Cotterill, Sat 12th Feb 2011 @ 1:06 pm
As a linguist - but not a parent - I'm fascinated by your experiences. I've read about things like baby signs but not really known anyone who's done it.
By sarah, Sun 13th Feb 2011 @ 4:21 pm
Whilst pregnant with Jean and after she was born I did alot of reading up on child development - due to me having hearing problems as a small child and then the dyslexia - I was very concerned about giving my children the best I could as if they had problems it would help them and if they didn't it wouldn't harm them and would probably be benificial.
Baby sign was fantastic 🙂 I have a few friends who used it as well.
By Lionel, Thu 17th Feb 2011 @ 7:55 am
I was interested in sign language many years ago. Remember reading that when the pilgrim fathers first went to America and met the "Red Indians", it was the deaf quakers among them that first started to communicate with the natives, because their sign language had a lot in common with "Indian" sign language.