Signing With Your Children
The main reason for teaching young children sign language is to cut back on frustration during the early, preverbal years. Babies as young as seven or eight months can learn basic signs like Milk and More. Two-year-old toddlers, who may have a normal vocabulary of 100 words or more, still get frustrated with their inability to speak clearly; signing can drastically cut back on the number of tantrums a child throws. For children who have language delays or are just late talkers, sign language can be a lifesaver. Many 18-month-olds can verbally tell their parents that they want to eat, but few can actually say what they’d like to eat. Children who use ASL at that age can often tell parents not only that they want to eat, but that they’d like a cookie, please, and also let their parents know when they’re full and want to wash their hands.
Very young children can learn sign language much sooner than verbal language for the simple reason that fine motor skills often develop before verbal abilities. Children no doubt have complex thoughts, it’s just a matter of expressing them. Sign language puts skills they’ve already mastered to good use.
Other sometimes-overlooked benefits come from the simple fact that ASL is another language. Most people would agree that it’s beneficial to teach children a second language while they’re still young, but people sometimes overlook that ASL is indeed a separate, non-English language. In addition, children who are in the habit of using two different languages will probably have an easier time learning another language later, perhaps when they enter school.
Some people do have concerns about whether teaching hearing children sign language can actually be damaging. Most often the concern is that children who can sign won’t bother learning how to speak verbally. In the vast majority of cases, parents find the complete opposite-their signing children tend to verbalize earlier than their peers. This may be because babies who are signing at 8 months are getting a head start at complex communication with their parents, which means language connections in the brain will be already made by the time the child is ready to speak verbally. Also, when a parent signs with a child, the parent speaks verbally at the same time. A parent might point at a dog, sign dog, and say, “Look at the black dog!” Furthermore, children who can use sign language to show their parents what they’re interested in are more likely to hear more speech about that interest. When a child points out and signs bird, parents usually respond by talking in great detail about the bird. Children who can’t speak or sign, and only point, are unlikely to even be understood.
In addition, research seems to indicate that hearing children who are fluent in ASL have higher IQ scores-sometimes as much as 10 points higher. An article in USA Today described a study done on hearing children who sign. They noted that “11-month-olds who learned gestures outscored their peers in language abilities a few months later, a bonus that remained in place at age 3.” The research further explained how “those same children outperformed their peers on a standard IQ test given at age 8. Indeed, the 32 children who had learned sign language as babies did an average of 12 points better on the IQ test. They scored an average of 114, while the 37 children who had never learned signs averaged 102. The researchers controlled for family income, education and other factors that influence IQ scores. The average child in the USA gets a 100 on the test.”
Parents who want to teach their children sign language have several choices to make. The first, and most important, is whether they want their child to learn ASL or more informal baby signs. Some ASL signs will be difficult for some children to learn, but simplified, non-ASL baby signs will not be useful later in life if the child has need to communicate with the deaf. Some books and videos are not clear about whether they use ASL or not-parents need to be sure which do before purchasing learning materials and starting to teach their children to sign.
In fact, it’s not totally necessary to buy books and videos to teach your children to sign. There are a multitude of websites that offer pictures and even videos of sign language. One of the best is from Michigan State University and can be found at http://commtechlab.msu.edu/sites/aslweb/browser.htm. For the most part, these websites do not teach about ASL word order and grammar, so if parents want their children to be truly fluent in sign language, further instruction is will be needed.
Some of the various books teach sign language are:
Sign With Your Baby, by Joseph Garcia
Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk, by Linda Acredolo
Baby Sign Language Basics, by Monta Briant
Sign Language for Babies and Toddlers, by Christopher Brown and John Clements
Many books have accompanying videos to demonstrate the signs. A set of stand-alone videos that are superb are the Signing Time series (www.signingtime.com).
