Baby sign language

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Baby sign language, pioneered by Dr. Joseph Garcia, is the use of manual signing in order to communicate with infants and toddlers. While infants and toddlers have a desire to communicate their needs and wishes, they lack the ability to do so clearly because the production of speech lags behind cognitive ability in the first years of life.[1] Proponents of baby sign language say this gap between desire to communicate and ability often leads to frustration and tantrums.[2][3] However, since hand-eye coordination develops sooner than acquisition of verbal skills, infants can learn simple signs for common words such as "eat", "sleep", "more", "hug", "play", "cookie", and "teddy bear" before they are able to produce understandable speech.[4][medical citation needed] Each individual infant will develop the ability to sign at a slightly varied stages in his or her growth. Before the infant will be able to sign it is necessary for the infant to be able to focus on the hand movement and have the cognitive skill to link a certain gesture to an item resulting in why babies will begin signing at various ages.[5]

Research

Behavioral research

In an article in the British Psychological Society's The Psychologist[6] Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon has considered in detail the theoretical bases behind the growth of this phenomenon and some of the claims made by its supporters.[7] As Doherty-Sneddon points out, so-called "baby signing" is not entirely new. Variants have been used by speech and language therapists for decades with children who have impairments to their speech, their cognitive abilities, or both.[8] It is widely recognized that communication is at the heart of child development, be it cognitive, social, emotional or behavioral.[9]

An American team led by Drs. Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn studied 11-month-old children. The children were assigned into three groups in this study: the first group consisted of children that were taught words including concurrent symbolic gesturing; a second group consisted of children whose parents stressed verbal training and taught the same words; and a third group received no special emphasis on training. Up until the age of three, the children's speech and language development was monitored. Results showed that the average scores of children in the study that were in the group that used Baby Sign Language were found to be higher than the non-training control group. No direct comparison was made between the symbolic gesture training group and the verbal training control group. By the age of 36 months, there was no continued advantage in the group that had been taught by symbolic gestures when compared to the non-trained control group.[10][11]

In a discussion section entitled "Implications for Parents", the authors summarize the results of the study by saying "By the 36 month comparisons, the [symbolic training] children were ahead of the controls, but not significantly so... significant positive effects do not appear to last."

They also propose[12][13] that those taught to sign reap such rewards as:

  • Larger expressive and receptive oral-language vocabularies
  • More advanced mental development
  • A reduction in problematic behavior like tantrums resulting from frustration
  • Improved parent-child relationships.
  • Advance comprehension
  • Ability to verbalize needs
  • Reduce aggression such as biting and hitting in result of the baby being able to express its needs
  • Increasing parent's respect for the baby
  • Parents become more responsive and observant of their baby
  • Promotes literacy

The mechanisms underlying these benefits are proposed to include:

  • an increased number of episodes of joint visual attention during interactions between parents and toddlers, known to be associated with improved language skills
  • empowering the infant to focus the topic and context of conversation
  • the discussion and clarification of concepts
  • added practice with the symbolic function.

Doherty-Sneddon claims a key issue is ensuring that sufficient and appropriately designed research is available to back the claims made in relation to baby signing. A literature review concluded that although benefits were reported in 13 of 17 studies, various methodological weaknesses leave the evidence unconfirmed.[14] Certainly, research into the effects of baby signing needs better control groups, such as children who are involved in equally interesting and fun activities based around adult and child language interaction, but not baby signing.

Volterra et al. (2006) [15] conclude enhanced gesture input for hearing children is a catalyst for gesture acquisition, and especially the use of representational form and hence symbolic communicative function. They add that this enhancement is short-lived (to between 12 and 15 months of age). Doherty-Sneddon argues, however, that this timescale represents only a general norm. The enhancement and advantage is far more extended in the many toddlers who do not speak until well after their second birthdays.

Doherty-Sneddon concludes by arguing there are three different levels of support for the benefits of baby signing:

  • indicative, if not evidentially strong, evidence from baby signing research;
  • related evidence from deaf sign and hearing gesture/language research;
  • compelling anecdotal support from families who have embraced the approach.

Developmental research

Dr. Joseph Garcia is often regarded as the leader of the baby sign language movement. He is the leading expert and proponent of using ASL to communicate with infants and toddlers. Dr. Joseph Garcia's first book Toddler Talk was published in 1994 following his graduate research. His research indicated that babies who are exposed to signing regularly and consistently at six to seven months can sign effectively within two to three months.[16] It was the first book to appear on the market regarding baby signing. In 1999, he published Signing With Your Baby, which became an Amazon.com best-seller winning numerous awards. He is regarded as the grandfather of baby sign language.

Research by Bonvillian & Folven indicates that children raised in a signing environment produce their first signs at a mean age of 8.2 months, whereas Capute et al. found a mean age of 11.3 months for the production of the first word in speaking children. This acquisition advantage has been found to extend to multi-word and multi-sign milestones as well. Signing children acquired 10 sign vocabularies at a mean age of 13.1 months, compared with 10-word vocabularies at a mean age of 15.1 months for speaking children. Milestones of 50 signs and 50 words were acquired at mean ages of 18 months and 19.6 months respectively.[17][18]

Two-sign combinations were first produced at a mean age of 17.1 months, while two-word combinations were first produced between 18 and 24 months. Acquisition of morphology or inflection was not found to differ greatly between signing and speaking children.[19]

In 1998, a program was conducted at A. Sophie Rogers Infant-Toddler Laboratory School in Ohio State University by Kimberlee Whaley. Infants as young as 9 months old and their teachers began to learn to use some signs from the American Sign Language to communicate with each other. The program was not intended to teach American Sign Language, rather to use signs to communicate effectively. The program found that children would use the signs they learned in the classroom at home. Another finding indicated that girls use signs more than boys.[20]

Language development

Sign language benefits a baby's language development in several ways, including increased vocabulary, more advanced literacy skills,[21] sentence structure,[medical citation needed] greater expression in gestures and spoken language[22][not in citation given] engagement in two-way conversations, and allowing communication between different spoken languages.[medical citation needed] Babies who engage in early sign language are found to have greater vocabularies by the time they are toddlers.[medical citation needed] Along with language skills, early use of sign language enhances cognitive, academic, social, and emotional development.[23]

According to Karen Emmorey, research has concluded that children develop language skills around the same time, regardless of being taught verbal or sign language. However, it appears that children who learn sign language begin manual "babbling" with gestures earlier than the spoken babbles of a baby exposed to verbal language.[24]

A study performed by the National Institutes of Health looked at two groups of babies: one group was taught baby sign language, the other verbal language. As the study progressed, babies from the signing group showed more advancement in language skills than the verbal group, including a greater advancement in verbal speaking. The difference in language skills was still apparent in the participants later on in life. By age 8, children from the original signing group had higher IQ's and ranked higher within their classes than the children from the verbal language group.[21][25]

Another study, involving two hearing impaired baby boys, looked at the significance of when baby sign language is introduced to a child. One boy's hearing loss was determined shortly after birth, and began learning baby sign language very early. The second boy was not determined to have hearing loss until he was two years old, and therefore was not exposed to baby sign language until then. The results of this study showed that the boy who was taught baby sign language had better acquisition of overall language skills, while the other boy, who was taught verbal language until his hearing impairment was detected, had a much more difficult time with language skills.[26] Baby sign language can prove to be crucial towards language development in some cases, yet does not cause any harm to those who do not have hearing impairments.

Baby sign language promotes communication before a child is able to verbally communicate with others. Since hand-eye coordination develops earlier than a child's ability to speak verbally, baby sign language allows a baby to begin experiencing and developing his or her language skills before he or she is physically able to speak.[27][28] Since gestures are part of normal speech, teaching baby sign language allows babies to learn an aspect of communication that is used just as commonly as verbal language.[29][medical citation needed] The advantage is that babies are able to learn gestures before verbal skills, and therefore those who learn baby sign language acquire language skills sooner than those who do not.

Controversy

Researchers have suggested the possibility of parents and experimenters being overly liberal in attributing sign or word status to early attempts at communication by children.[30] There is not a universal consensus on the criteria for differentiating a child's sign or word from a more simple gesture or vocalization. Large differences in acquisition arise when only signs that label objects rather than request objects are considered. In this case the mean age of first sign production becomes 12.6 months and is more comparable with the mean age of first word production in speaking children (11.3 months).[17]

Children sometimes produce a combination of a pointing gesture and a spoken word earlier than they would produce a spoken two-word combination.[31] As not all studies are uniform in accepting or disqualifying pointing gestures as signs, this can also lead to discrepancies depending on how the research is carried out.

Additionally, two possible explanations have been suggested for the differences shown in language acquisition between speaking and signing children.[32]

Multiple Timing Mechanism
Under this theory, separate developmental mechanisms would control vocabulary and syntax development. Earlier maturation of the visual system as compared with the oral system would result in the first sign being easier to produce versus the first word. This would also allow for the separate development of vocabulary and syntax.
Unitary Timing Mechanism
This developmental mechanism would be activated at the start of language learning and would result in a relatively fixed amount of time between language acquisition milestones. Alternatively, a unitary mechanism could activate at the same time in all children, irrespective of the onset of language learning. Environmental or peripheral factors, such as language modality or differences in a language's morphology and syntax could explain the differences between acquisition milestones in speaking and signing children.

Practice

Parents and caregivers can sign to babies beginning at birth (using signs for simple ideas like "milk" and "more"). Comprehension on the part of the baby can begin at six months, and the children can begin producing signs themselves around 10 months. Parents and caregivers should be aware that infants will recognize their first sign before producing their own. They should also be patient with their children when they first begin signing to their children because it may take a little while before the baby can understand or even produce signs themselves. Consistency is crucial when teaching your infant how to sign. Infants learn through repetition - that is why it is essential for parents and caregivers to repeatedly use signs. Every time an action is performed the caregiver should sign the action to the child. When using a sign the parent should say the word out loud because this will help the baby link the gestures to verbal skill development.[33]

There have been studies to show that, even by increasing the use of gesture, not necessarily use of a sign language (such as ASL) can increase the richness of a child's linguistic development and speed future processing.[34]

Advanced Gesture through Interaction with Parent[34] Goodwyn, Acredolo & Brown (2000) have investigated the effects of instructing parents to encourage gesture use on language development. There were three groups studied. The "gestural training group" parents were given a set of 8 toys and told what gestures would be used with each toy. They were also encouraged to create gestures or use isolated ASL signs with their children; parents were presumably not native signers. Both the experimental and control groups were given receptive and expressive tests at 11, 15, 19, 24, 30 and 36 months. Receptive language means being able to recognize words and signs while expressive language means being able to form words or signs. The study found that children whose parents taught them symbolic gestures performed better on both expressive and receptive verbal language tests than children who had not been encouraged to learn such gestures.The results of these tests proved that children who were introduced to symbolic gestures had advance verbal development.[10]

The most interesting point seems to be that the Gestural Training Group may have small but reliable advantages in early language milestones other than age of the first word:

  • "enhanced symbolic gesturing seemed to benefit Gesture Training infants' receptive and expressive language development."
  • The evidence helps to alleviate previous notions that gesture or sign language might interfere with or slow down language development.

A naturalistic case study that was done in Central Texas focused on ideologies and socialization of baby sign language. This study had 3 families that participated. This study was performed through naturalistic interactions that took place in each of the families home. They were videotaped during meal and play time for a total of 7 hours. These ideologies value early communication with infants and promote the adaptation of the physical, social, and linguistic environment to their perceived needs. In this study it showed that baby-signing families used signs to socialize their children into particular interaction rituals.[35]

Case study on bilingual exposure

A study entitled "Hearing Children Exposed to Spoken & Signed Input"[34][36][37] investigated the transition from gesture to sign in a case study of an Italian, hearing, bimodal, bilingual child.

Marco was "a bilingual hearing child of deaf parents exposed to sign and [oral] language from birth". Though both parents were deaf, they used both Italian Sign Language (LIS) and spoken Italian, at some times simultaneously. Marco was also regularly enrolled in a day care with Italian-speaking peers.

Gesture was considered anything that a hearing (Italian) monolingual child had also been observed producing, whereas LIS was only considered in use if it resembled an adult speaker's LIS or a simplified sign, as judged by a native signer.

The study noted these points as interesting:

  • Under these criteria, Marco did not appear to have a "sign advantage." "Sign advantage" refers to the hypothesis that children who learn sign language and spoken language simultaneously will reach early linguistic milestones more rapidly in sign than in speech.
  • Differences appeared in Marco's use of deictic and representational gestures as compared to those of monolingual children.
  • "While Marco used proportionately more representational than deictic gestures at both comparison points, monolingual children produced deictic gestures much more frequently than representational gestures."
  • He was able to use representational gestures more comfortably and practically, showing that "exposure to sign language may enhance a children's appreciation of the representational potential of the manual modality; this may, in turn, generalize to gesture use."
  • Marco differed from all the studied monolingual peers in that he was able to combine and use two representational gestures.

In popular culture

Baby sign language was a plot element in the movie Meet the Fockers, where Jack (Robert De Niro's character) had taught his grandson "Little Jack" sign language. The twins that portrayed Little Jack (Bradley and Spencer Pickren) learned sign language from watching Signing Time! videos.[38]

In today's society many parents are interested in learning how to sign in order to communicate with their infants. By signing it will reduce frustration for both the caregiver and child because the infant will now be able to communicate their needs through signing which will give parents the opportunity to understand. There are numerous ways to learn how to sign. For example, there are sit and play workshops that teach parents and children how to sign through play. Parents can also use a program called Baby Signs that help parents develop signs based on gestures babies already make. A popular program Sign with your Baby uses the basics of American Sign Language to teach simple signs such as milk and more. Through these programs it makes it possible for hearing parents to teach their infants how to sign.[39]

Images

  • Eat finish en.jpg
  • Mom dad en.jpg
  • More drink en.jpg
  • Play now en.jpg
  • Tired sleepy hurt en.jpg
  • Yes no en.jpg

See also

References

  1. ↑ Loncke, F., Bonvillian, J. & Dooley, T. "in preparations- Applications of the Simplified Sign System". 2012.
  2. ↑ Garcia, Joseph. "Baby Sign Language Research." Sign2Me. Northlight Communications, Inc., 2010. Web. 23 Sep 2010. <http://sign2me.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=17&Itemid=33>.
  3. ↑ Summary of the Benefits of Signing. Signing Time! Two Little Hands Productions, 2006. Web. 23 Sep 2010. <http://www.signingtime.net/pdf/st/STResearch_Summary.pdf>.
  4. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  5. ↑ Cesafsky M. J. (2009). Baby Sign Language: Hindering or Enhancing Communication in Infants and Toddlers? 1–29. Retrieved from http://www2.uwstout.edu/content/lib/thesis/ 2009/2009cesafskym.pdf
  6. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  7. ↑ Doherty-Sneddon, G., "The great baby signing debate", The Psychologist, Vol. 21, Part 4, April 2008, pp300-303
  8. ↑ Clibbens, J., Powell, G.G. & Atkinson, E. (2002). Strategies for achieving joint attention when signing to children with Down's syndrome. International Journal of Language and Communication Disorders, 37(3), 309–323
  9. ↑ Vygotsky, L.S. (1978). Mind in society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 http://www.mybabycantalk.com/content/information/research/Impact%20of%20Symbolic%20Gesturing.pdf
  11. ↑ http://www.deafeyeseeit.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/Response_to_Research_Critique.pdf
  12. ↑ Acredolo, L.P., Goodwyn, S.W., Horobin, K. & Emmons, Y. (1999). The signs and sounds of early language development. In L. Balter & C. Tamis-LeMonda (Eds.) Child psychology (pp.116–139). New York: Psychology Press
  13. ↑ Goodwyn, S., Acredolo, L. & Brown, C.A. (2000). Impact of symbolic gesturing on early language development. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 24, 81–103
  14. ↑ Johnston, J., Durieux-Smith, A. & Bloom, K. (2005). Teaching gestural signs to infants to advance child development. First Language, 25, 235–251
  15. ↑ Volterra, V. Iverson, J.M. & Castrataro, M. (2006). The development of gesture in hearing and deaf children. In B. Schick et al. (Eds.) Sign language development. New York: Oxford University Press
  16. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  18. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  19. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  20. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  21. ↑ 21.0 21.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  22. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  26. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  27. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  28. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  30. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  31. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  32. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  33. ↑ http://www2.uwstout.edu/content/lib/thesis/2009/2009cesafskym.pdf
  34. ↑ 34.0 34.1 34.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  35. ↑ Millennium Web Catalog. 0-muse.jhu.edu.helin.uri.edu. Retrieved on 5 January 2014.
  36. ↑ Capirci, Montanari & Volterra 1998
  37. ↑ Capirci, Iverson, Montanari, & Volterra 2002
  38. ↑ [1][dead link]
  39. ↑ Dickinson, Amy. (16 October 2000) Signs Of The Times. TIME. Retrieved on 5 January 2014.

Further reading

External links

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