Baby sign language is the use of sign language 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. Proponents of baby sign language say that this gap between desire to communicate and ability often leads to frustration and tantrums. 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.
Read more about Baby Sign Language: Behavioral Research, Developmental Research, Research Controversy, Practice, In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the words baby, sign and/or language:
“Where did you come from, Baby dear?
Out of the everywhere into the here.
Where did you get your eyes so blue?
Out of the sky as I came through.”
—George MacDonald (1824–1905)
“Prove that ever I lose more blood with love than I will get again with drinking, pick out mine eyes with a ballad-maker’s pen and hang me up at the door of a brothel-house for the sign of blind Cupid.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“The reader uses his eyes as well as or instead of his ears and is in every way encouraged to take a more abstract view of the language he sees. The written or printed sentence lends itself to structural analysis as the spoken does not because the reader’s eye can play back and forth over the words, giving him time to divide the sentence into visually appreciated parts and to reflect on the grammatical function.”
—J. David Bolter (b. 1951)