Can Teaching Sign Language to Babies Help Their Development?

From the newsroom of the Fox Network News, Tuesday, October 10, 2000 ....

By Simon Crompton, The Times, United Kingdom

Like most babies, Meadow Cairns has her fretful moments. Is she hungry or
thirsty? Does she need a nappy change? Is she too hot or too cold? Is she
tired or even in pain?

Get it wrong and the fretful moment can end in a temper tantrum because
your baby knows what she wants but cannot get her parents to understand.
But not Meadow. She tells her parents what is wrong and what she wants even
though she cannot talk yet. Despite having perfect
hearing, Meadow has used sign language since she was nine months old.

When she wants milk she repeatedly opens and closes her fingers into a
fist. When she is teething she puts an index finger up to her mouth, then
puts the finger into the palm of her opposite hand and makes a circular
motion - the sign for medicine.

Signing also enables her parents to glimpse her feelings. Recently, when
her father, Nick, an IT consultant, had spoken to her over the phone during
a late-night stint at the office, she signed to her mother, Gill: "Please
more Daddy."

Watching babies as young as eight months old understanding and using signs
is a remarkable experience. They are transformed from being enigmatically
appealing to being interactive, animated and strangely grown-up. Yet until
recently, using sign language with babies was seen as an option only for
deaf children.

Now parents and specialists in the US have recognized that though babies
lack the motor skills to produce speech, they have the conceptual ability
to understand and use language and the physical ability to make signs. The
work of the child development researcher Joseph Garcia in particular has
meant that signing with hearing children has become popular in the US among
thousands of families.

In the past six months there has been an explosion of interest in Britain,
with the launch of Garcia's teaching pack due here in March. Converts such
as the Cairns family from Gloucester have formed clubs and Web communities,
and Kids Unlimited, one of the UK's leading nursery chains, is training its
staff in the system and introducing signing into four of its nurseries.

Garcia got the idea for his "Sign with your Baby" system when visiting the
family of a deaf friend. He saw a baby of ten months old communicating in a
far more sophisticated way than hearing children of the same age, using
American Sign Language.

Researching the subject, he discovered that hearing children began
replicating signs as early as six months. Earlier child development experts
had theorized that babies cannot mentally represent symbols until they are
almost two - about the same time they become able to put together basic
spoken sentences.

Garcia advocates that parents start exposing their babies to a few simple
signs from the age of seven months. So each time a mother is about to feed
her child, she should make the sign for "eat" - putting the tips of the
fingers together and tapping the mouth several times - so that the
association between the sign and the activity becomes clear.

Parents need patience to keep on repeating the signs, based either on
American Sign Language or British Sign Language. But babies usually
indicate that they understand a sign within weeks. By nine months they are
usually able to reproduce signs, and once they have learnt a few basics
they pick up others more quickly and combine them into short sentences such
as "Where Mother?" or warnings such as "Touch no - hurt". Garcia and his
supporters - who include some US parenting experts - claim that signing has
long-term benefits. They quote studies indicating that signing accelerates
language development and increases IQ, including one that shows that by the
age of two signing children have a vocabulary of around 50 words more than
their non-signing counterparts.

British child development and language experts will form their own judgment
on whether signing with hearing babies is just another money-making US fad
(the Sign with your Baby pack costs £50), or if it holds real benefits for
families.

The initial impression of Professor Sue Buckley, a world authority on
communicating with disabled children, is positive. Garcia's theory is
almost certainly right, she says, given the fact that researchers have
recently discovered that deaf children using sign language have an early
learning advantage because they learn more vocabulary more quickly than
non-signing children. "Although non-signing children catch up, the earlier
you communicate, the more likely you are to get a head start," she says.

The evidence from children who have delayed speech development, such as
those with Down's syndrome, is that learning sign language teaches the same
skills - such as attending closely, slowing down, forming words clearly -
that are needed for learning spoken language. It can act as a bridge into
speech. So parents who sign with their child should not worry about
delaying his or her spoken word.

"Babies want to communicate and will move on to another way of doing it as
soon as they can," says Buckley. "Words support thinking and every word is
a bit of knowledge about your world. The more you can do it in one
language, the easier it becomes to transfer it to other languages."

Others are more cautious. Bencie Woll, Professor of Sign Language at City
University, is skeptical about the system's claims that it can lead to
increased intelligence. "To prove that, you would also have to carry out
parallel studies showing that stimulating them with, say, music did not
have the same effect," she says. "It could be the intensive teaching that
is the important factor."

If claims that using sign language reduced frustration and behavioral
problems were true, she adds, then parents of deaf signing children would
be reporting fewer temper tantrums.

"That's not the case," says Woll. "Signing could give parents something to
do with their children, which is nice, but I can't see any long-term
benefit. Signing children might be more communicative for six months than
their counterparts, but then everyone joins up. So you have to ask what's
the point?" Gill and Nick Cairns do not regard signing as a competitive
tool. They are more impressed by the immediate benefits signing brings in
terms of reducing frustration, says Nick.

"Meadow appears more laid back than her older sister. At 23 months her
temper tantrums are fewer and she expresses herself more clearly than her
sister could at the same age. Sophie had more spoken words, but only used
one word to get her message across. Meadow has been signing three-word
sentences since she was 16 months old."

What Gill Cairns values most about signing is the special bond it brings
with Meadow. "You look at a little baby who can't talk and you see her sign
'biscuit', and then when she gets the biscuit and knows you've understood,
her face lights up. You know what's going on."

Now Meadow uses sign language with her first words to begin conversations.

"Meadow will use a sign to tell us she's seen a dog, and then we can talk
about dogs with her using signs and us using signs and spoken words," says
Gill. "It's great fun."

© Associated Press
© Reuters Ltd.
© News Digital Media 2000

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