Devenish

--> More beer?! This is too long a message for a Facebook post so I’ve put the details in a blogpost. Should be of interest to those of you interested in language acquisition (sign language, in particular). In spite of its title, however, it’s probably of no interest to those of you who are only interested in beer… 'Look at the camera!' The background to the story is the language of our youngest son, Justin. As many of you know from a birthday post back in November, Justin is a child with Down Syndrome, the most obvious symptom of which is his delay in speech production. As far as we can tell, Justin understands simple utterances in both English and Japanese well enough to be happy at home, and to engage with others in his day nursery. But his spoken output is highly restricted. From the beginning of his language development, he has compensated for this by using Makaton signs (these may be more familiar to British readers who have seen the CBBC serie