Rejoice ! Shaylee , the girl ofASL Nook ’s Sheena McFeely and Manny Johnson , is back with a new ASL Christmas tale . We ’ve been watch her storytelling skills originate for a few years now . When she was 4 , we cooed over her version ofThe Night Before Christmas . The next class she made our hearts originate three sizes withHow The Grinch steal Christmas . Then last twelvemonth we laughed and call out out with glee at the story ofRudolph the Red - Nosed Reindeer .
Though ASL is in many way different from spoken language , when it comes to the timeline of natural childhood language attainment , it is almost exactly the same . ( Shaylee ’s parents are Deaf signers , so her environment is an ideal one for this process to stretch out . ) At 4 , we saw her get comfortable withgrammatical conceptslike topic / comment structure . At 5 , she expertly navigated the expression ofcharacter linear perspective . At 6 , her understanding ofnarrator voicewas solid . Now , with this public presentation ofThe Polar Express , we can see an impressive supremacy of ever more pernicious and complex scene of storytelling , like metrics .
Prosody look up to rhythm and voice intonation in spoken language . For sign , there is no vocal pitch contour , but there are prosodic feature like blinks , center regard , torso shifts , and the tension and speed of augury . Because there is so much vocabulary in common among Christmas stories , we can take a facial expression at prosody development by comparing the same sign from Shaylee now with three years ago .
For example , observe the difference between " Santa incur on his sled " then and now . The first has a cute , babyish " tone of voice . " The second has a ripe , storyteller note .
The articulation of the sign itself on the handwriting is crisper , neater , and , with respect to narrative , more designed . The same can be seen in the change to " very old " in the last few eld .
Thanks again , Shaylee ! For sharing your holiday spirit with us , and for render us the wonder of language acquisition in legal action .
