More beer?

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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 series Something Special/Mr Tumble, most episodes of which are available on Youtube). 

Makaton is not a fully fledged sign language, though it shows many similarities to BSL; instead, it is intended to be used to supplement speech for children with developmental delays on one sort or another. Justin, though, has taken the system and run with it, developing some of his own signs. This including a sign for beard, which is made by running his upturned right palm, from left to right, under his own chin. (Justin likes beards, for reasons unknown).

One of the good things about his signing is that he can use it in place of either Japanese or English. He’s at 2-3 MLU(m), so in principle he could code-mix, but he never does in spoken production. With signs, though, things are different; for example, he’s happy to combine an English verb plus signed object, or Japanese verb plus the same signed object (VO vs. OV word order, respectively).

So much for the background. Here’s the interesting bit. Two nights ago, we were out at a Mexican restaurant in Okamoto (a rarity in this part of Japan). We had ordered and received our drinks and had some appetisers. Justin finished his apple juice (SIGN-APPLE)-‘gyunyuu’ (Japanese milk), and wanted more (‘SIGN(APPLE)-gyunyuu-SIGN(MORE)’…

Then he looked across the table and seeing my beer was nearly finished, he said/signed

Dada, SIGN(MORE), SIGN(BEARD), SIGN(QUESTION [head tilt to left])

That is,

“Dad, d’you want more bear(d)?”

He knows the difference between beer and beards—besides, I don’t have a beard (!)—but used the phonological similarity between the two to generate the right sign. (As I understand it, kanji are selected for Western names on the same principle of homophony).

Justin might only have a few words, but he’s far from linguistically stupid!