From Singing to Signing
By Emilie de Azevedo Brown
“Rachel Coleman is my best
friend, and just happens to be my little sister as well,”
jokes Emilie de Azevedo Brown about her 27-year-old
sister. Referring to Rachel, Emilie says that “as a
child, she was shy and reserved. As a teenager, she was
angry and reserved. Then she learned to express herself
through her music.” Rachel taught herself to play guitar,
began writing music, and started a band called We the
Living. She sang some of her original songs with her band in
the 1995 NBC Movie of the Week, Spring Fling. Rachel fell in
love with music, and later with a tall skier named Aaron.
After Rachel and Aaron were
married, they had their first daughter, Leah. Leah’s
parents took her to band practices and concerts, and to
their amazement, she was able to sleep in spite of the loud
music. When she was fourteen months old, they discovered
why: Leah was deaf. She never heard the music. She never
heard her mom sing.
“When I realized my daughter was
deaf,” Rachel admits, “I just couldn’t find a way to
rationalize spending hours working on my music. My
priorities changed. I put down my guitar and picked up sign
language.” She and Aaron immediately started learning
American Sign Language–so they could teach it to Leah.
Rachel was astonished to see that
within six months, Leah’s sign language vocabulary far
surpassed the vocabulary of hearing children her same age.
Rachel explains that “while her little friends could only
point at something they wanted, Leah could actually tell us.
Because she had learned to use sign language so early, it
was not long before she could read written words, even
though she was only two years old.”
Rachel soon learned that Leah’s
advanced capabilities were fairly common among signing
children—both hearing and Deaf. There is an
abundance of research explaining the phenomenon that she had
experienced first-hand: children can communicate with signs
well before they can communicate with spoken words.
Emilie and her husband also started
teaching sign language to their infant son, Alex, so that he
would one day be able to communicate with his cousin Leah.
Emilie was stunned one afternoon when Alex, then only ten
months old, stopped fussing, looked up at her, and made the
sign for “milk.”
Experiences like this have played a
role in prompting many day cares and preschools to
incorporate sign language into their
curriculum--specifically for hearing children. Like Emilie,
many parents have watched in amazement as their toddlers,
who cannot yet speak, sign words like “more,” “milk”
and “mom.”
Two years after this discovery,
Rachel and Aaron were expecting their second daughter. An
ultrasound discovered spina bifida and hydrocephalus. As
Emilie describes it, there was “no denial, and very little
‘Why me?’” Rachel and Aaron simply demonstrated the
same attitude they did with Leah: “How can we give her the
fullest life possible?”
Just as Rachel had immersed herself
in learning sign language to help Leah, she began learning
everything she could about spina bifida to help her second
daughter, Lucy. In her research, she discovered the work of
Dr. Joseph Bruner and Dr. Noel Tulipan at Vanderbilt
University. They were pioneering an experimental procedure,
which actually operated on children with spina bifida while
they were still in their mother’s womb.
Rachel contacted Dr. Bruner, and
made arrangements for this procedure. At 22 weeks, Rachel’s
unborn daughter, Lucy, became the 82nd baby to undergo fetal
surgery at Vanderbilt University. The surgery successfully
closed the hole in her spine and helped regulate the water
on her brain. However, Lucy was born pre-mature, which
brought a new concern: cerebral palsy.
Doctors worried that, due to her
cerebral palsy, Lucy would never be able to communicate with
her Deaf sister. However, Rachel has been teaching Lucy to
sign. At the age of two, and in spite of her cerebral palsy,
Lucy currently signs over twenty words and recognizes and
responds to more than fifty signs.
There has recently been an
incredible amount of media attention focusing on how infants
and toddlers can communicate with signs before they can
speak. The research, as well as the first-hand
experience of many parents like Emilie and Rachel,
demonstrates that signing children generally have higher IQ
scores, are better adjusted, and read at an earlier age. By
learning to communicate earlier, the “terrible twos” are
not so terrible. And, with more than one million Americans
using sign language–500,000 of whom are either Deaf or
hearing impaired–this form of communication has become an
important part of American culture.
While early communication is a
blessing to all parents interested in the benefits of
teaching sign language to their children, Rachel confesses a
more personal goal. “My hope is that all kids will become
bilingual with American Sign Language. It would be a very
different world for my daughter if, at the playground,
another child came up to her and signed ‘hi friend, you-me
play.’”
After years of musical silence,
Rachel recently picked up that guitar again, writing the
theme songs for a children’s sign language video, “Signing
Time”. She used to sing for herself and her fans.
Now, she sings for Leah and Lucy.
Bio of Author: Emilie de
Azevedo Brown
As the daughter of composer/musician Lex de Azevedo, Emilie
has always felt at home in the performing arts. She said,
"While I still love to sing, my career has ended up
being talking, not singing". Emilie has done voice-over
work, television and radio commercials, voices for animation
and CD-ROMs, and background voices and voice replacements
for TV shows and films. She has been involved with such
shows as Touched by an Angel, Walker Texas Ranger, Disney's
Inspector Gadget, Xena, Hercules, and many others. Emilie is
the mother of Alex (who is featured in Signing Time) and
Zachary. Emilie is married to Derek Brown. You can contact
Emilie at signingtime@hotmail.com
or at http://www.signingtime.com.
You can find a picture of Rachel, Leah, and Alex here.
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