Baby Signs Are Simple and Smart
By The Editors of Sesame Street Parents
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Teach your baby sign language? Why not? It's fun. It's useful. And it could boost your child's IQ.

Researchers recently discovered a 12-point IQ gap between a group of second-graders who had been trained to sign as babies and a group who had not. "We were astonished," says one of the researchers, Linda Acredolo, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of California at Davis.

Baby signing gained appeal in 1996 with Baby Signs: How to Talk With Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk (Contemporary Books), which Dr. Acredolo cowrote with Susan Goodwyn, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at California State University at Stanislaus. It is based on the idea that babies wish to talk long before they can form words. (Think how they wave bye-bye or shake their heads no.) What's more, parents can build on this desire and enhance parent-infant communication by teaching their babes simple gestures, such as patting their hip to say they need a diaper change.

No one knows why baby signing would raise IQs. It may be that, as Acredolo and Goodwyn's research shows, signing gives babies a jump-start on language. Or it could be that signing makes them seem extra intelligent to their parents. "And if parents treat their babies as smart, it may be a self-fulfilling prophesy," Dr. Acredolo says. "The children may blossom to meet their parents' expectations."