The question has been posed about cue babbling and the various stages as well as the relationship to spoken language development. Mary-Beth and I want to offer a disclaimer that each child is different and that it wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate to make conclusions based on one case study.
That being said, there are some insights into our experience raising a child with hearing who certainly isn’t afraid to speak her mind.
In the beginning, we started seeing her play with the handshapes at seven months. She started cycling through the handshapes in terms of wiggling her fingers into the hand shapes while watching us cueing to her. Eventually she started using cued handshape 1 for daddy and doggy a month or two later.
There’s some cue babbling in this video as well:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-agqkLKpm8
Skip to 2:05 to see how Arabella attends to my cueing and watch her hands as well. She’s playing with the handshapes more here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9hSpfkWBlU
From what we’ve seen, hand shapes are more distinct than hand placements for expressive cues. Arabella does not have the side placement concept down, however she can cue the first sound and sometimes the correct vowel (spatial awareness). She is working on the transitions between handshapes as well. What’s really interesting though is she does have a lot of the suprasegmentals in her expressive cueing. For example, she will extend the “ooooo” in “moo” via both cues and speech.
In my opinion, it’s clear that fine motor skills for cueing hand shapes are a challenge for any 2 year old, but that receptive skills shouldn’t be limited. Arabella’s expressive language via spoken language indicates her strong receptive vocabulary in both spoken and cued language.
We’ve been talking and cueing with her this whole time, but no sign language, at least any kind of signs that would be considered ASL other than “I love you” and some basic signs for some animals. I’ve looked at the research regarding babies and sign, and my opinion is that signing can be used as support, but language immersion is critical, especially in English, so we’ve placed emphasis on immersion in the languages she will be primarily using, English and Spanish (she gets some Spanish in day care). It’s my belief that she will not have a difficult time learning ASL due to her strong language base, but it would be best to learn from more appropriate models than her own parents for purposes of fluency.
I also believe because we’ve been very consistent with the auditory-visual integration that Arabella has been capable of learning in multiple modes (speech only, cue/voice off, etc) and she is capable of repeating words like “dihydrogen monoxide” if I cue the word a few times to help her through the multiple syllables. The cueing does make it easier for her to process more complex words. She even was able to recite the numbers 1 through 5 in Spanish around 12 months because we were able to provide her with direct access to the phonemic structure.
There are certainly stages to cued language development for children, however, we may have to recognize the limitations of expressive cueing at very early ages, and not push so hard for young children to cue expressively, but to rather model specific words and ask them to cue a sound or a simple word. We do make a point with Arabella to refer to hand shapes and placements by their numbers and places (“show me handshape 5 at the mouth” and she uses that to help herself figure out the cueing). Mary-Beth tends to focus on the hand placements as she responds well to that. We started using these labels pretty early on, probably before 12 months.
Mary-Beth and I do feel that Arabella is on the verge of some sort of breakthrough with her cueing as she went through a period where she seemed to really move quickly past the basic vocabulary and into more complex language. Her natural mode of expression is via speech, so she was able to use that more easily and get positive reinforcement for sharing her ideas and thoughts via verbal expression.
In the end, Arabella’s preferred mode of expression is via speech, but she also incorporates gestures and signs into her communication as well as cueing. The cueing seems to be more present in connection with reading as I cue more clearly and slowly in that context.
We encourage parents to keep up with the cueing. Children will benefit differently from cueing, but in the long term it’s worth it. Feel free to contact us if you have any questions.
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