Baby sign, or baby signing, is the use of manual signing allowing infants and toddlers to communicate emotions, desires, and objects prior to spoken language development. With guidance and encouragement, signing develops from a natural stage in infant development known as gesture. These gestures are taught in conjunction with speech to hearing children, and are not the same as a sign language. Some common benefits that have been found through the use of baby sign programs include an increased parent-child bond and communication, decreased frustration, and improved self-esteem for both the parent and child. Researchers have found that baby sign neither benefits nor harms the language development of infants. Promotional products and ease of information access have increased the attention that baby sign receives, making it pertinent that caregivers become educated before making the decision to use baby sign.
Overview
Baby sign involves enhanced gestures and altered signs that infants are taught in conjunction with spoken words with the intention of creating richer parent-child communication. The main reason that parents use baby sign is with hope that it will reduce the frustration involved in trying to interpret their pre-verbal child's needs. It can be considered a useful method of communication in the early developmental stages, since speech production follows children's ability to express themselves through bodily movement.
Baby sign is distinct from sign language. Baby sign is used by hearing parents with hearing children to improve communication. Sign languages, including ASL, BSL, ISL and others, are natural languages, typically used in the Deaf community. Sign languages maintain their own grammar, and sentence structure. Because sign languages are as complex to learn as any spoken language, simplified signs are often used with infants in baby sign. Teaching baby signs allows for greater flexibility in the form of sign and does not require the parent to learn the grammar of a sign language. Baby signs are usually gestures or signs taken from the sign language community and modified to make them easier for an infant to form.
It is common for the difference between symbolic gestures and baby signs to be mistaken. Symbolic gestures are a form of communication that children adopt before they develop the ability to produce spoken language. This includes pointing to what they want or using a hand motion in conjunction with a word which allows greater communication for infants. Writing on the topic, Jane Collingwood states that "Infants from about six months of age can begin to learn the basic signs, which cover such objects and concepts as "thirsty", "milk", "water", "hungry", "sleepy", "pacifier", "more", "hot", "cold", "play", "bath", and "teddy bear"." Typically developing children will produce their first gestures between the ages of 9 and 12 months without any prompting or assistance from a caregiver. Infants learn how to use their body language, eye gaze, and hand gestures as a way to attract attention and communicate. Once children gain some language production, they will couple language with gesture to further communicate. Gesture remains present in all individuals at any age which is a distinguishing factor from baby sign.
Pros and cons Suggested benefits Baby sign promotes communication before a child is able to verbally communicate with others. Since gestures are part of normal speech, teaching baby sign allows infants to learn an aspect of communication that is used with language. It is not, however designed to replace language. This demonstrates that infants are able to learn gestures before mastering verbal skills. Therefore, those who learn these simplified signs may enhance their cognitive development by gaining language skills through both visual and auditory modes.
In an article in The Psychologist, Gwyneth Doherty-Sneddon has considered in detail the theory behind the growth of this phenomenon and some of the claims made by its supporters. Doherty-Sneddon points out that baby sign is not entirely new. Variations have been used by speech and language therapists for decades with children who have impairments to either their speech, cognitive abilities, or both. It is widely recognized that communication is at the heart of cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral development in children. Baby sign may assist in improving these significant developmental functions.
Baby signs create mutual attention between the parent and child leading to further elaboration of what the infant is communicating. A study collected self-reports from mothers who had engaged in a baby sign training workshop, to clarify whether or not signing with their child would create added parental stress and/or enhance parent-child communication. Overall the parents did not express feeling heightened stress or frustration from the baby sign training process but rather they reported a greater ability to understand their child. This richer communication was found to lead to a more positive interaction with their child which overall benefits the establishment of an earlier parent-child bond.
Children who learned enhanced symbolic gestures performed better on both expressive and receptive verbal language tests compared to those who had not been encouraged to learn such gestures. Receptive language means being able to recognize words and signs, while expressive language involves the process of forming words or signs. Research has shown that enhanced gesture input for hearing children is the first step toward successfully mastering gesture use, and the use of representational form and symbolic communicative function. Improved symbolic gestures may contribute to language development by providing children with increased knowledge of concepts by explaining the functions of the objects that they are exposed to. In support of expressive language development studies have shown that learning symbolic gestures can lead to advanced verbal development and accelerated language acquisition. An effective baby sign workshop also resulted in the improvement of numerous areas of development by comparing the child's results before and after the workshop. Some of these areas included communicative, cognitive, social, adaptive behavior, physical, and fine motor skill development of children. This enhancement however, is short-lived (from 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 also states 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 weaknesses in the methods used for baby sign studies leave the evidence unsupported. 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. This suggestion for further research implies that it may not be the baby signs themselves that facilitate language development but rather the underlying benefit being active, joint attention that is stimulated by baby sign.
Therefore, the enhanced joint visual attention during parent-child interaction empowers the infant to focus the topic and context of the conversation, clarify concepts, and creates added practice with symbolic interaction. These underlying mechanisms of baby sign are proposed to create benefits for the infant such as; enhancing vocabulary, advancing cognitive development, reducing tantrums and frustration, and improving the parent-child relationship and communication. More specifically language development is improved by advancing comprehension, promoting literacy and successfully allowing the infant to express their needs so the parent becomes more responsive and observant of their baby.
Why it may be neither beneficial nor harmful 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. Puccini and Liszkowski found that when infants associate labels with objects, they use verbal cues more frequently than gestures to make these associations. The process of further facilitating gesturing with baby signs is suggested to possibly cause interference toward children's mapping of these words. This may be a result of infants lacking enough attention to take in these two types of information and process it at the same time. It is suggested that these labels, and further through the facilitation of baby sign, that it is unlikely that baby sign is facilitating speech development in infants.
Baby sign programs encourage parents to improve their communication skills between themselves and their infants before they have developed speech. Kirk and colleagues have found that the results of their study with hearing infants provided no evidence to support that a child's language development would benefit from learning baby sign. They also found that children who participated in baby sign had similar language development to children who did not learn baby sign. It is suggested that participating in baby sign may be an unnecessary effort with infants when being motivated by the hopes of advanced language learning for the child. However, it was found that mothers who used baby sign with their infants encouraged increased independence with them and supported a higher level of independence for their child. Another conducted research study has shown that there are no significant differences found with language acquisition between infants who are receiving or not receiving exposure to baby sign, including reaching language milestones. Although no support for using baby sign was found in this study, there was also no negative effects found to be associated with language development when using baby sign with your child. It is possible that baby sign is working in support of infant's spoken language, but was not found to further their later language development.
The results of multiple studies regarding baby sign have found that the advantages provided do not go beyond children over the age of two years old. The results of this literature review have not shown support that baby sign increases a child's linguistic development. When teaching a child baby sign, an infant's attention is directed away from what they are interested in and is redirected towards the adult and the desired sign. This interaction has been claimed to increase joint attention between parent and child, but has yet to be studied enough in research literature. It has also been proposed by researchers that baby sign may increase parental stress rather than decrease it because of busy lifestyles that may be disrupting interactions between parents and children. Teaching baby sign outside of research settings does not allow for the parent to raise questions or concerns to trained individuals. Reaching fundamental linguistic milestones and the natural course of children's language development has been suggested to be disrupted because of the unnatural intervention in language development that baby sign provides, supported by the lack of support in prior studies which have been analyzed.
Learning baby sign There are numerous concepts to keep in mind when encouraging baby sign. Caregivers should ensure that they have their infant's attention, maintain consistency with what sign is used and how it is used in relation to an item, repeat signs often, encourage the infant, and be alert to recognize when the infant is signing back.