Long before they talk, babies know what they want to say

Emma is 18 months old, and like many children her age she can’t say many words yet. But she is able to communicate with her parents—telling them she’d like more juice by tapping an index finger on the palm of the opposite hand, pointing out a dog in the park by sticking her tongue out as if she’s panting and making reference to the silly hat her mother’s friend is wearing by tapping her hand on the top of her head.

Emma’s parents have been teaching her 'baby signs,' a trend that is sweeping through some baby circles around the country since psychologists Linda Acredolo, PhD, and Susan Goodwyn, PhD, began publicizing their book, 'Baby Signs: How to Talk to Your Baby Before Your Baby can Talk' (Contemporary Books, 1996).

Acredolo and Goodwyn base their book on a line of research they’ve pursued for the past 20 years. Their premise is that babies have the cognitive capacity to say words months before their articulatory system is mature enough to allow speech. But they are fully able to produce rudimentary gestures to refer to various objects—such as flower, car and dog—and represent some simple requests—such as more, eat and drink.

Most young children learn to wave goodbye well before they can say 'bye-bye,' says Acredolo. She and Goodwyn are simply expanding on that concept. And they’re finding that babies easily learn many gestures well before they can talk.

A review of research on deaf children finds that first signs do tend to begin slightly before first words, says Rochester University psychologist Elissa Newport, PhD, who conducted the survey with Richard Meier, PhD. And there’s reason to believe that children have the cognitive abilities to say words before they have the physiological ability to do so. But several language acquisition researchers think the idea of teaching babies signs is a little hokey.

Maybe so, says Acredolo, but parents and children seem to enjoy it, and it gets very young children excited about language.

'These gestures are not meant to be a language,' says Acredolo. 'They are temporary gestures that help children get over the hump where they would love to tell you things but can’t.'

She and Goodwyn also have some evidence that learning baby signs may have a positive effect on general language development. They followed more than 130 families with 11-month-old infants at the start of the study for three years. The researchers asked one-third of the parents to purposefully teach their babies gestures, beginning with eight target words. They asked another third of the parents to work at verbally teaching their babies a similar set of eight words. And the last third received no instructions and didn’t know the study had anything to do with language.

By the time children were 15 months old, Acredolo and Goodwyn started seeing differences in verbal language acquisition among the three groups of children. In general, the children who learned the gestures had a larger verbal vocabulary, and better comprehension than the children in the other two groups. The researchers continued to see difference in vocabulary, comprehension and on other cognitive measures through age 3, says Acredolo.

It’s not clear why learning gestures would enhance verbal learning, she says. It may be because of all the language-related attention they get from parents and other adults who respond to the gestures.

'I believe that the gestures make communicating so rewarding that children get excited about communication and look for other ways to express themselves,' says Acredolo.

The findings from the longitudinal study will be published in 'Child Psychology: A Handbook of Contemporary Issues' (Garland Press, in press) and 'The Nature and Functions of Gesture in Children’s Communications' (Jossey-Bass, in press).

—Beth Azar

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