Words, Signs and Apraxia

We have been taking sign language for a few months and are about to start an intermediate course.  We are getting more comfortable having a basic conversation in ASL.  C has been doing an awesome job doing signs with her approximations since about December.  Signing with her attempts at verbalizing gives her more motor memory to work from when trying to say it again.  Apraxia is all about repetition and building motor memory helps.  So, signing has been great.  Her sign vocabulary keeps growing.  When I tried to make a list of sign she uses regularly for school last week it was over 30 signs.

We took the little one out with some people from our ASL class, our deaf teacher, her family and friends.  There were 4 little girls signing.  It was so interesting to watch them share crayons and request colors with sign.  If feel like we saw it click for her that some people talk with just signs.  Since she had only seen signing with talking previously I think this is the first time she really understood it was a language on it's own.


The moment I e-mailed the list to school she stopped using her signs as often.  Her private speech therapist thinks it is great that she is signing less.  She is still producing good approximations without the sign.  This means her brain is telling her mouth what to do on it's own, without additional motor help.

So, we will keep learning more signs and she will keep outgrowing them.  I'll keep you posted.