This morning i was traveling on the tube in London. I rarely have the pleasure anymore of this transport hub. I was making a long journey from Zone four in the north to zone four in the south. Not all of London is covered by the tube so i broke the journey with a bus trip. To pass the time i was reading Steven Pinker The Language Instinct. A great read if your interested in exploring language. Both ASL and spoken languages are compared and covered.
So i'm reading to pass the journey time. The bit of knowledge which Mr . Pinker is imparting is all about American sign language courses between parents and their kids. He describes the uncanny ability of kids to pick up grammatically correct signing from an early age. 99% of deaf kids are born to hearing families. So the grammer of the parents who sign with their kids will be fine. They would have studied a sign language course once they'd discovered their child was deaf.
However a study was conducted on a totally deaf family who had a son who was also deaf. The parents had taken up signing late in life and their grammer was not great. Naturally they start signing with their son to get him in to the language of hands. You might think that he'd pick up on their bad grammer and using it in a daily context. But no! This child was able without any outside influences to determine that the signing sentences which he was being taught were grammatically flawed and he was able to correct them!
I'm really impressed by this revelation! The passage moved to how hearing parents get their kids to speak. The thing is, it's not parents who help their kids to speak! Apparently it's a almost like a preset function in humans to be able to form words. So the story goes that parents spend lots of time mouthing syllable by syllable words, with the misguided idea that this helps! (Don't shoot the messenger!)
This woman with a pram arrives in the carriage and positions the pram so she can see the kid. I'm settled in to the book minding my own business and then it starts!
"Do you want this app ull?", "Does baby want this greee - n app ull?". Announciating those words just as the the book said. Over again she was trying to get the baby to say something back. I was astonished to see this sign language demonstration before my eyes! How weird is that? Has it ever happened before? Not to me! It's not unusual to see mothers with prams on the tube, but the coincidence is mind boggling!