Baby Sign Language - Practice

Practice

Parents and caregivers can sign to babies beginning at birth (using signs for simple ideas like "milk" and "more"). Comprehension on the part of the baby can begin at six months, and the children can begin producing signs themselves around 10 months.

There have been studies to show that, even by increasing the use of gesture, not necessarily use of a sign language (such as ASL) can increase the richness of a child’s linguistic development and speed future processing.

Advanced Gesture through Interaction with Parent Goodwyn, Acredolo & Brown (2000) have investigated the effects of instructing parents to encourage gesture use on language development. There were three groups studied. The "gestural training group" parents were given a set of 8 toys and told what gestures would be used with each toy. They were also encouraged to create gestures or use isolated ASL signs with their children; parents were presumably not native signers.

The most interesting point seems to be that the Gestural Training Group may have small but reliable advantages in early language milestones other than age of the first word:

• "enhanced symbolic gesturing seemed to benefit Gesture Training infants’ receptive and expressive language development."
• The evidence helps to alleviate previous notions that gesture or sign language might interfere with or slow down language development.

Case studies have also been done to see what the effects of bilingual exposure can do to help in language acquisition and progress. This specific case study was done with Marco, an Italian hearing child of deaf parents.

Hearing Children Exposed to Spoken & Signed Input (Capirci et al. 1998) 2002 investigated the transition from gesture to sign in a case study of an Italian, hearing, bimodal, bilingual child.

Marco was "a bilingual hearing child of deaf parents exposed to sign and language from birth". Though both parents were deaf, they used both Italian Sign Language (LIS) and spoken Italian, at some times simultaneously. Marco was also regularly enrolled in a day care with Italian-speaking peers.

Gesture was considered anything that a hearing (Italian) monolingual child had also been observed producing, whereas LIS was only considered in use if it resembled an adult speaker's LIS or a simplified sign, as judged by a native signer.

Interesting Points:

• Under these criteria, Marco did not appear to have a "sign advantage." "Sign advantage" refers to the hypothesis that children who learn sign language and spoken language simultaneously will reach early linguistic milestones more rapidly in sign than in speech.
• Differences appeared in Marco's use of deictic and representational gestures as compared to those of monolingual children.
• "While Marco used proportionately more representational than deictic gestures at both comparison points, monolingual children produced deictic gestures much more frequently than representational gestures."
• He was able to use representational gestures more comfortably and practically, showing that "exposure to sign language may enhance a children’s appreciation of the representational potential of the manual modality; this may, in turn, generalize to gesture use."
• Marco differed from all the studied monolingual peers in that he was able to combine and use two representational gestures.