Our NV Experience at 2 weeks

[Guest guest]

Hi all-

Here is my update of how my 35 month old Son has been doing after Week one-

two on NV. - I will refer to your guidelines in my response....

Tyler is 35 months old

His diagnoses include Moderate to Severe Apraxia, Mild PVL, hypotonia.

1. Speech Improvements.... he is making a greater effort to speak to

us..... he is babbling up a storm..... and becomes very frustrated because we do

not understand what he is saying. My Son's speech has always been

extremely delayed..... despite 4x per week therapy, the most we have been able

to

accomplish are one to two word utterances/approximations. His Speech

issues have included: restricted consonants, reduction of words to a single

vowel, vowel distortions, inability to sequence consonants.... there are more

issues on his Speech Report.... I just listed a few.

The babbling is new...... ALSO- as he is babbling-- he also makes gestures

in an attempt to try to tell us what he is talking about! What is

interesting is that he is using his same KNOWN words/word approximations AND HE

IS

ALSO babbling between these. (almost like he is speaking in his own form of

sentences now). He also has developed many new word approximations. He

has started to imitate things we say more.... My hubby and I can be

engaged in a convo- and my Son tries to mimic what we are saying... (This is

new). One more thing-- Tyler NEVER babbled as a baby..... Classic for

Apraxia..... he is making up for that lost time now!

2. Language Improvements: He has ALWAYS demonstrated an ability to

understand what is said to him prior to being on NV.... for example- if we tell

him to get something... he will do it. He has seemed to have improved with

following multi step directions..... such as " get your coat and shoes " .....

before NV- he would just get one item.

3. Increase in Facial Expressions- a definite yes..... Before NV, he was

the type of kid who was always smiling.... and who liked to play jokes on

us..... We call him our " little prankster " ....

AFTER NV- the smiles remain.... BUT , during the above mentioned babbling

that goes on between words or word approximations, he now has many more

facial expressions. Before NV.... he would say his usual one or 2 words....

and then his mouth would kind of " hang open " .....with an " almost blank

expression " .... Now- we are seeing many more facial expressions besides the

smiles.

4.. Quicker Motor Planning- a definite yes..... he has seemed more

interested in doing things himself.....things that he usually would want me to

do

for him. For example, he did a fairly decent job of getting his coat on all

by himself for the first time..... without prompting after week one! By

week 2, he is able to put his coat on completely by himself (using the " one,

two, peek a boo method " - (where he pulls the coat over his head). I used

to always put his coat on for him-- but decided to teach him how to do it

himself.... he learned very quickly! He has been helping himself to things

from the fridg..... and announces what he is going to get prior to opening

up the fridg.

5. Academics/Learning: N/A to my Son- he has not yet started school.

Does it count that my child learned how to put his coat on by himself in less

than one week though? I say yes!

6. Fine and Gross Motor Skills: I see no change in fine motor-- he never

had probs in this area. He did have Gross Motor Delays due to his Hypotonia.

He made his first attempt at jumping after week one on NV.... He still

has not " officially jumped " .... but he is getting closer to it! We have been

working on this for months.... and after one week of NV.... he started to

do it.

7. Sense of Humor No change- our Son always had a great sense of Humor -

(always laughing, smiling, etc).

8. FOCUS This remains a problem for us.... Our Son has always had a

short attention span.... which can interfere with his Therapy.... If I really

think about it.... I WILL say that on SOME days, he seems to focus better

during therapy..... but, his attention span remains a problem.

This is about all that I noticed from your list, .

Other things..... he had really stinky poops during the first week....

these poops were formed, but they were HUGE-- (I have no idea how some of

them came out of his little bum).... He at times, had a few of these

" monsters " each day..... and we had to triple bag each of them... they REALLY

smelled! LOL ! Some of these huge formed poops had a " gunky greasy looking "

liquid - like thick diarrhea around them. He is back to normal now.

-He was hyper like many have described, but this has reduced as well.

-He woke up in the middle of the night after day 2 or 3 SCREAMING and kept

pointing to his head and telling us " EH UR " (head hurts).... This only

happened once..... We have since, made sure he has more water during the day.

- He has lost one pound since we started NV..... (not a big deal).... he

has been more active.

-I also noticed that Tyler seemed to have had a massive increase in his

night time urination near the end of week one. It was easy for me to notice

this- because he still wears diapers. We had been pushing more water

throughout the day.... but we did not do this at night. Tyler also goes to bed

quite late..... and is changed prior to bedtime. He was completely drenched

in the am.... I am talking about a totally SOAKED through heavy sleeper

and visibly wet bedding. I am wondering if his body was processing toxins!

This has reduced at week 2.

That is about it!

Take care all-

[Guest guest]

this is all so incredible! OK the question is how many days would you say

it was prior to you noticing any changes in Tyler? Also -with the academic like

you say he's probably too young to know any changes in that area in the classic

sense -but starting to recognize colors, numbers, letters...enjoying picture

books and coloring -observing any difference in how he holds and uses his

crayons -things like that you can look at in his age. And yes I'd say learning

how to put his coat on by himself totally counts!!!! -that's HUGE!!!

Don't forget we have the survey that you helped us design up at

http://www.pursuitofresearch.org right on the front page you'll see the link

-but the link is on every page. Should we take the survey whenever or wait till

our kids are on it for at least a month prior to taking the survey? Also we are

open to your constructive criticism on the site -Jolie and I have worked really

hard on it trying to cover all the basic questions. And call me when you have a

chance -have some cool stuff to share

About the babbling -I'm so happy you brought that up because we've for sure

covered the terrible two stage that some of the kids here go through later that

is so important -but there are as I talked to you about other developmental

stages that some kids go through later too -and better later than never. Mel

went through the oral exploration/chewing on things stage...after a few weeks on

nutriiveda. Of course when they go through these stages later -they don't last

long. But developmentally they are important. And yes -as you said your little

guy never babbled -and that is as you know such an important stage of acquiring

speech! (I have more on that below)

When Tanner was little I learned about the importance of " blocking " for

sentences. What your babe is doing is getting ready for his sentences

(exciting!!!) What we used to do is work on breath control with a whistle and

try to get Tanner to imitate toots on a whistle. What his therapist said is

that if he didn't have the breath control to imitate the long and short toots on

a whistle, he wouldn't have the breath control for a sentence. That was a huge

issue for Tanner even as he got to school age and started to read- if you check

the archives he used to complain if he read out loud for a few pages that his

" breath hurt " I never knew what that meant...but you may because of the

fact you are a nurse. One of our friends who is an MD had a surgery on his neck

and it cut his vocal cords and he had to relearn how to speak -and he told me he

knew exactly what Tanner meant about his breath hurting.

Point is that what...it's been TWO WEEKS!!! I mean this is just incredible we

are seeing so much so quickly in so many. I can tell you from what I've seen in

Tanner who's been on this the longest in our group (and then Mel second longest)

that the surges do not stop -I mean as I wrote before I didn't think Tanner

could have gotten any better than what seemed like " normal " but what I still see

improvements in now is how quick he is in sense of humor -like a comic at times.

And some of his reflections- just so mature and well thought out.

Here is some info on the importance of the stage Tyler is going through now.

Again because he is going through it later it won't last as long as it would

have!

BABBLING AND EARLY WORDS

A child's entrance into human society begins with the onset of language

development. Parents often acknowledge this accomplishment upon hearing their

infant's first words. Research on early language has convinced scientists that

the emergence of first words is inseparable from important developmental

milestones that occur prior to the recording of these words. Pre-speech

vocalizations can be examined narrowly within the verbal domain only, or can be

explored in a wider scope as related to cognitive and communicative developments

that are established during the first year of life. The study of pre-speech

vocalizations flourished during the last quarter of the twentieth century.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s, most efforts concentrated on describing

the sounds infants produce. In the 1990s, study of pre-speech development

expanded in several important directions.

The Form of Infants' Pre-Speech Vocalizations

Pre-speech vocalizations are divided into reflexive vocalizations (e.g., cries,

coughs, hiccups), which are related to the baby's physical state, and

nonreflexive vocalizations (e.g., cooing, playful productions, yelling), which

contain phonetic and syllabic features of speech. Both vowels and consonants

appear in nonreflexive vocalizations, and the most prevalent syllable structure

is a consonant followed by a vowel (CV; e.g., \ba\, \du\, \ke\). The overall

composition of pre-speech vocalizations changes dramatically during the first

year of life. In the first six months, babies all over the world sound alike.

During this period, vowels predominate and are supported by prolonged back

consonants (e.g., \k\, \g\). During the next six months, the sound repertoire

significantly expands, with a marked shift toward more frontal consonants.

Locke reported in 1993 that, by their first birthday, American English-speaking

infants produce stops (\p\, \b\, \t\, \d\, \k\, \g\), nasals (\m\, \n\), and

glides (\w\, \j\).

Stages in the Development of Pre-Speech Vocalizations

Developmental stages of pre-speech vocalizations (e.g., as described by Carol

Stoel-Gammon in 1998) are not discrete, and vocalizations from previous stages

continue to be uttered subsequently. Novel emergent behaviors define the

beginning of a new stage. Ages are assigned to each stage as estimates only,

because children differ greatly regarding the timing for recording milestones of

early language development.

The first stage (from zero to two months), phonation, is characterized mainly by

fussing, crying, sneezing, and burping, which bear little resemblance to adult

speech. The second stage (at two to three months), cooing, begins when back

vowels and nasals appear together with velar consonants (e.g., \gu\, \ku\).

Cooing differs in its acoustic characteristics from adult vocalizations and is

recorded mainly during interactions with caregivers. In the third stage (at four

to six months), vocal play or expansion, syllable-like productions with long

vowels appear. Squeals, growls, yells, bilabial or labiodental trills, and

friction noises demonstrate infants' playful exploration of their vocal tract

capabilities during this stage.

In the extremely important canonical babbling stage (at seven to ten months),

two types of productions emerge: reduplicated babbling� " identical, repetitive

sequences of CV syllables (e.g., \ma\ma\, \da\da\); and variegated

babbling� " sequences of different consonants and vowels (e.g., CV, V, VC, VCV =

\ga\e\im\ada\). Such productions are not true words, as they lack meaning.

Canonical babbling is syllabic, containing mainly frontal stops, nasals, and

glides coupled with lax vowels (e.g., \a\, \e\, \o\). The emergence of canonical

babbling is highly important, holding predictive value for future linguistic

developments. Oller and her colleagues in 1999 argued that babies who do not

produce canonical babbling on time are at high risk for future speech and

language pathology, and should be carefully evaluated by a language clinician.

In the fifth stage (at twelve to thirteen months), jargon or intonated babble,

infants produce long strings of syllables having varied stress and intonation

patterns. Jargon sounds like whole sentences conveying the contents of

statements or questions, and often co-occurs with real words. Yet, it lacks

linguistic content or grammatical structure.

Pre-Speech Vocalizations in Different Target Languages

The early interpretation of similarities in the phonetic structure of babbling

among infants who acquire different languages (e.g., Japanese, Hebrew) was that

pre-speech vocalizations are universal. This observation was explained by the

strong constraints of the mouth's anatomical characteristics and by

physiological mechanisms controlling movements of the tongue and palate.

Cross-linguistic research in the 1990s revealed, however, that clear influences

of segmental and suprasegmental patterns (i.e., intonation and stress) of the

input are recognizable in pre-speech vocalizations. This is particularly true

during the second half of the first year of life. In a longitudinal comparative

study by Bénédicte de Boysson-Baradis (1999) of ten-month-old Spanish,

English, Japanese, and Swedish infants, the relative distribution of consonants

in their canonical babbling resembled the distribution of these segments in

their language. As babies grow, the segmental similarity between their babbling

and early words increases. Several studies by Jusezyk and colleagues on

speech perception indicate that infants' sensitivity to the acoustics and

phonetics of languages increases with age, influencing their ability to

discriminate the sequences of sounds and syllable structures typical to their

own language. Indirect evidence for the role of audition in the development of

pre-speech vocalizations derives from studies on deaf children, who show

significant delays in the emergence of canonical babbling and also a decreased

variety of consonants uttered from age eight months onward.

Mutual Imitation within Mother-Child Interaction

In 1989 Metchthild and Hanus Papoušsek were among the first researchers to

point out that more than 50 percent of two- to five-month-olds' noncrying

vocalizations are either infant imitations of mothers' previous vocalizations or

mothers' imitations of infants' previous vocalizations. They suggested that this

mutual vocal matching mechanism relates to the emotional regulation of

communication in the beginning of life. Joanna Blake and Bénédicte de

Boysson-Bardies found in 1992 that infants tend to vocalize more while

manipulating small objects and especially when adults are present. Edy Veneziano

in 1988 analyzed vocal turn taking in pairs of nine- to seventeen- month-old

babies and their mothers. She reported that, as children advance toward

conventional language, mothers' imitations of what babies say becomes selective.

Mothers imitate only those infant vocalizations resembling conventional words,

thus signaling to the child what constitutes a linguistic symbol with meaning.

Pre-Symbolic Productions in Hearing and in Deaf Infants

Cumulative research on pre-speech vocalizations clearly indicates that babbling

is in fact structurally and functionally related to early speech. Locke argued

in 1996 that when variegated babbling emerges, a consistent relation is

identified between vocalizations and specific communicative functions (i.e.,

protest, question, and statement). At around age eighteen months, the child's

phonological system is clearly shaped by the target language's phonetic

characteristics, and at that time conventional words emerge.

Indirect evidence for the developmental significance of babbling was published

in a revolutionary 1991 paper by Petitto and a Marentette on hand

babbling in two deaf infants of signing mothers. The argument was that these two

infants (who were recorded at ages ten, twelve, and fourteen months) produced

far more manual babbling than three matched hearing infants at similar ages. The

deaf infants' hand babbling also revealed phonetic features of American Sign

Language, suggesting that babbling reflects infants' innate ability to analyze

phonetic and syllabic components of linguistic input.

Pre-Speech Productions and First Words or Signs

Early words are produced by the child in expected contexts, and hence are

recognized by familiar listeners as linguistic units conveying meanings. In 1999

Esther Dromi distinguished between comprehensible and meaningful words.

Comprehensible words are phonetically consistent forms resembling adult words

that caregivers understand, but that do not yet convey referential meanings.

Meaningful words are symbolic, arbitrary, and agreed-upon terms of reference.

Considerable variation exists in both the age of speech onset and the rate of

early lexical development. Large-scale questionnaire data reported in 1994 by

Fenson and his colleagues for English-speaking typically developing children,

cited the range of vocabulary size for twelve- to thirteen- month-olds at 0 to

67 different words, and for eighteen- to nineteen-month-olds at 13 to 471

different words. In 2000 Maital and her colleagues reported very similar figures

for Hebrew.

Early words are constructed from a limited set of consonants, mainly stops,

nasals, and glides. Syllable structures in these words are usually CV, CVC, or

CVCV. Several researchers found that during the first few months of lexical

learning, many new words are composed from segments that the child is already

using in babbling. A number of researchers have proposed that patterns of

lexical selection and avoidance reflect the child's production capabilities.

When productive vocabularies contain more than a hundred different words, the

influences of phonology on the lexicon decline. Nevertheless, children who have

relatively larger lexicons of single words also show larger inventories of

sounds and syllable structures than children with smaller productive lexicons.

Precocious word learners have much larger phonetic inventories than typically

developing children at age eighteen months. The major semantic achievement in

the first few months of vocabulary learning is the ability to use words

referentially. Martyn Barrett and Esther Dromi, who independently carried out

detailed longitudinal analyses of repeated uses of the same words over time,

have argued that some early words show referential use from their outset, while

other words are initially produced only in very specific contexts. Throughout

the one-word stage, the phonology of words improves, and meanings become

symbolic and arbitrary. A word initially produced in just one situation is now

uttered in a much wider range of contexts, until it becomes completely context

free and referential. As words become conventional tools for expressing

meanings, the amount of pre-speech vocalizations declines and gradually

disappears.

See also: INFANCY; LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

Bibliography

Barrett, Martyn. " Early Semantic Representations and Early Word Usage. " In Stan

Kuczay and Martyn Barrett eds., The Development of Word Meaning. New York:

Springer, 1986.

Blake, Joanna, and Bénédicte de Boysson-Bardies. " Patterns inBabbling: A

Cross-Linguistic Study. " Journal of Child Language 19 (1992):51-74.

de Boysson-Bardies, Bénédicte. How Language Comes to Children:From Birth to

Two Years. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999.

Dromi, Esther. Early Lexical Development. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University

Press, 1987.

Dromi, Esther. " Early Lexical Development. " In Martyn Barrett ed., The

Development of Language. London: UCL Press, 1999.

Fenson, Larry, Philip S. Dale, J. Reznick, Bates, Donna Thal,

and S. J. Pethick. Variability in Early Communication Development. Malden, MA:

Blackwell, 1994.

Jusczyk, W. The Discovery of Spoken Language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,

1997.

Locke, L. The Child's Path to Spoken Language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1993.

Locke, L. " Why Do Infants Begin to Talk? Language as anUnintended

Consequence. " Journal of Child Language 23 (1996):251-268.

Maital, Sharone L., Esther Dromi, Avi Sagi, and Marc H. Borenstein. " The Hebrew

Communicative Development Inventory: Language Specific Properties and

Cross-Linguistic Generalizations. " Journal of Child Language 27 (2000):43-67.

Oller, D., and E. Eilers. " The Role of Audition in Infant

Babbling. " Journal of Child Language 59 (1988):441-449.

Papoušek, Metchthild, and Hanus Papoušek. " Form and Function of Vocal Matching

in Interactions between Mothers and Their Precanonical Infants. " First Language

9 (1989):137-158.

Petitto, A., and a F. Marentette. " Babbling in the Manual Mode:

Evidence for the Ontogeny of Language. " Science 251 (1991):1493-1496.

Stoel-Gammon, Carol. " Role of Babbling and Phonology in Early Linguistic

Development. " In Amy M. Wetherby, F. Warren, and J. Reichle eds.,

Transitions in Prelinguistic Communication. Baltimore: s, 1997.

Veneziano, Edy. " Vocal-Verbal Interaction and the Construction ofEarly Lexical

Knowledge. " In M. D. and L. Locke eds., The Emergent Lexicon: The

Child's Development of a Linguistic Vocabulary. New York: Academic Press, 1988.

Vihman, Marilyn M. Phonological Development: The Origins of Language in the

Child. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1996.

Esther Dromi

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Babbling and Early Words

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