We signed with DD from early one. She did her first signs around 6 months and even signed a sentence once then (more milk). We stopped because she also started talking at that point so we figured it would take over. It never did. She'd say words here and there and never repeat them. She built up a decent vocab and was always ahead but never used it consistently. Eventually at about 14months she found our own baby signs books and started pointing at different signs to ask me to show them to her.
After that we started signing with her a lot up until the last month or so. At just under 18months she knows probably somewhere between 150-200 signs and has signed up to 5 word sentences. However, she's very much limited by my own knowledge since I've been learning right along side of her and there are very few signs that I know that she doesn't. I think we're at the point where I really either need to study it seriously or hope she starts speaking more!!!
Flower:
I meet an adorable little 18 mth at the gym pool the other day who uses ASL to communicate and the mother said they are having a hard time getting her to speak because she prefers ASL to communicate with. She knows about 50 words in ASL and clearly signs in sentences. The other concern she had was that while away from mommy at the daycare she is running into problems of communication because the teachers don't know ASL which leads to frustration for her daughter.
Do you find that you have an issues such as above?
Yes, we really this problem. I'm the only one that knows all the signs that she knows. Even DH doesn't know what she's saying all the time. At the playground it's especially hard for her because she'll try and sign to the other kids and nobody gets her. We've had potty training issues because she will sign to go to the bathroom and if she's with DH or MIL they forget the sign and won't take her even when she asks.
One interesting thing, though. DH and I both speak different languages to DD. We've found that her pronunciation of English is significantly worse when compared to DH's language. I do wonder if this has to do with signing. As in she's put more effort into learning the pronunciation of DH's language because she knows that with me she can just sign. However, the number of words are pretty much the same (and today she said a 2 word sentence in English, something that I have never heard her say in DH's language).
I think that the use of sign is the use of language and takes the same cognitive skills to put together a signed sentence as a spoken sentence it just takes different muscles. I have not read anything to the contrary but if someone has info that way I would be interested in it.
As for this. There was a really interesting article I found awhile back about average milestones of kids of deaf parents. They found that the average was somewhere between 50-120 (I think, I'm not 100% sure) at 18months, which is certainly larger than the spoken between 20-50 words. Also they found that the kids that signed could sign sentences much sooner. So I guess if your child is signing sentences, it might mean that it takes the same grammatical knowledge as a spoken sentence but you can't really compare the age of spoken sentences vs. signed sentences to perfect delays/giftedness. (Obviously, you could compare to other signers or speakers but not between the two).
