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:

  same thing can happen when developmentally typical kids are learning to talk. consider when we teach a kid "yellow" and show them a banana, there's an awful lot of room for misinterpretation as to what yellow might mean. it's pretty amazing we ever figure it all out at all.... just use the word for "more" yourself a lot when nowhere near the lids. more water? pour some more in the cup. etc. he'll make the connection eventually and it's totally understandable if it's not instantaneous.