Bilingual Experiences of a Deaf Child

BILINGUAL EXPERIENCES OF A DEAF CHILD Judith Stein Williams My husband and I had long expected that our children would have impaired hearing. Our genetic makeup showed this: Our parents, my uncle,and his four sons are deaf on my side, and four uncles on his side, and so are we. I was born deaf. My husband lost his hearing at the age of six months during an attack of whooping cough, which could be a sign that he was easily susceptible to deafness. When our son Todd was born, he showed so much alertness with his eyes and was so unresponsive to normal sounds that we knew he was like us. My main concern was not his inability to hear (he is nearly five now and I still don't even give it a thought), but was instead how well he could live within the hearing world. His language acquisition was far more important, since this could open many channels for him including speech, lipreading, manual communication, and writing. The most important part was being able at an early age to express himself linguistically in the simplest forms. Lack of this ability can lead to personality and psychological problems. So I started talking to him like all mothers do, cooing, babbling, singing nursery rhymes and the like--but I added signs and fingerspelling while doing all this. It was not until he was nine months old that he finally expressed himself clearly in sign language. He loved to throw his spoon on the floor from his highchair and yell for me to pick it up. I always asked him, signing and speaking, "Where is the spoon? " pointing Williams to it before picking it up. This time he threw it again but asked me in signs, WHERE SPOON? and pointed at it. This led soon to his substituting in this frame other signs (words) like ball, light, cat, dog, and book; and we went on to using the "Pictionary" and "First Objects" and other books I read to him from while he looked at the objects pictured . By the time he was one year old he was able to identify about fifteen different things in short sentences. His vocabulary increased, but it was not until after he was toilet trained (at about twenty months) that I introduced him to fingerspelling and put a lot of stress on this way of presenting words. He mastered this kind of communication of sentences on his level in a few months, and he associated the manual alphabet with the printed alphabet. At twenty-five months he started reading, and when he was turning three, he had five hundred words in his reading vocabulary and loved to read pre-primers and beginningto -read books. His language developed in the simultaneous sense, that is, through lipreading my speech, fingerspelling, printed matter, and signs. I see no conflict in his bilingual acquisition of English and Sign but believe that it greatly aided him. He loved nursery rhymes and was able to recite them himself. He eventually used his speech and sang some syllables out loud. I enrolled him in the Gallaudet preschool when he was thirty months old, and its program gave him a lot of auditory training and speech work which I was not able to give him at home. His hearing aid did wonders (although he has an 85 decibel loss in both ears across the whole frequency range), and he responded more to speech and showed willingness to learn to say words accurately. From this point everything else seemed to come naturally, and his curiosity brought him even further, until I would say that he is progressing just as normally hearing children do except that he is less vocal. He learned English very readily in expressive exercises, routines , monologues, and interpretations as well as in social responses and requests for information as the situation required. Simplification of grammatical structures was.necessary in the early stages, but now at four years and ten months he simplifies them himself for his sister, Tiffany, two years younger, and elaborates them for his Daddy. His bilingual experience is in some ways like and in others unlike that of...