What Is Your Celtic Sign?

How do you know if you're child is signing because they understand what the sign means?

• We're trying to use American Sign Language with our son who is non-verbal. He uses PECS, a different way of communicating through flash cards, but it's inconvenient, so we're trying to get him using ASL as well. He is autistic and has a hard time with learning something new in the first place, so it has taken a while for him to sign one thing without a 2 hour battle... but we are there now. Now he will sign certain things if we tell him what to sign. For example, he does 'more', 'play', 'wait', 'stop', some animals, and 'sit' if we TELL him to sign it. The problem is, we do not know how much he really understands. We used the flash cards when we taught him the signs so hopefully he'd understand what it meant. He also follows those commands *sometimes*. Like he will sit if you say 'sit', but not every single time. Recently, he has started doing some on his own, which is great of course. He's been doing 'more' a lot. But it seems to me that whenever he signs 'more', what he really wants is lids off the Tupperware (he's obsessed with lids and wants to take them off all the Tupperware containers and stim with them). I've never seen him sign 'more' for anything but the lids. That's why I'm concerned that maybe he thinks that the sign for more is the sign for lids. I thought about teaching him the sign for lid, but I'm not sure how to distinguish between 'more lids' and just 'lids'. I don't know if that's even necessary to do. His therapist is away for 2 weeks, and I want to deal with this right now. Does anybody know how to deal with this? I want to get him signing more for different things too, not just lids. What should I do?

• Answer:

  While "more" is a nice one to learn since it's a pretty versatile word, it can be a double edged sword as you run into circumstances where "more" is the word they use for more of almost anything and it replaces all those other words. "Help" is another one which can replace too many words (Instead of "help with shoes" or "help shoes" they just say "help", but they also say just help for "help with reaching cookies", etc). I would either work on explicitly on using more in other circumstances - get mini cookies or small candies or something else he has an interest in and work on getting him to ask for more by using the sign - or I would scrap using "more" until he has more nouns covered. More's a good one to work on when you're trying to work on two-word combinations (more milk, more juice...) but is not a great first word to sign/learn to say for that reason.