5 months old, week 4

The baby Juli still turned herself to tummy as soon as I put her on the floor on her back. But now, when I put her on the floor, often her head leaned forward and her legs lifted up in an attempt to sit up or to control her head landing. Though, it helped strengthen her tummy.

Distinguishing ASL words from animal visues

To have fun reading the book "Perfect Pets" by Roger Priddy, I signed an ASL word of each animal and then made a goofy characteristic of the animal.

These animal visues liken to animal sounds in hearing culture where a parent makes an animal sound, such as "woof" for dogs, "moo" for cows, etc.

It's natural that, in our eyeing culture, we supplement animal visues to our language as we are visual people. It's no less different from sound animals used with infants in hearing culture.

This instict is part of parentese that parents naturally and instinctly use with infants found in different cultures, languages, and modalities (signlan and speech) around the world.

Video clip: As Juli listened, I signed an ASL word of the animal. Then, I acted out an animal's distinct characteristics with a funny distinct facial expression as well as using ASL's rich classifiers. Juli laughed hard.

This showed that Juli understood humor in the act-out part which was apart from the linguistic part. It appeared that Juli was able to distinguish language from animals visues (an analog to animal sounds).

ASL expression

The ASL words and phrases that I used with Juli this week are as follows: fruit drink, apple, mother cook...

you crawl cl-crawl will, definitely-will, father gone-to work, father home now. ix work done/finish, mushrooms(lawn) ix-plu bad, not eat, no-no...

Imitation

Lucky this time that I captured the original moment. Intentionally, I wanted to capture Juli's smile with two pearly little teeth. How?

I exaggeratedly shaked my head with big smile and with a recording camera in my hands, trying to make Juli smile.

Unexpectedly, I found Juli imitating me by shaking her head. She did a few times but after that, she laughed whenever I did.

Video clip: Every time I shook my head, its movement affected the stability of the camera in my hand, thus losing the clarity of Juli's head movement in video.

Talking about what you're doing

Talk with your baby about what you're doing. It helps connect language with daily activities.

Whenever Juli watched me with interest, I explained to her what I was doing -- cooking, picking up lawn mushrooms, etc.