Can Sign Language Help You Communicate with Your Baby?

If you have a baby, you’re probably familiar with this scenario:  Your baby is crying and you just can’t figure out what will make the tears stop.  Does she want a bottle? Does he need a hug?  Before babies learn how to speak, they usually don’t have any other tools to explain their needs --- but these days, some parents are using sign language in the hopes that they’ll be better able to communicate with their babies. 

Parents Corina and Eric Douglas have been bringing their 11-month old daughter Claire to the classes for several months. During a break from class, they’re going over some signs for fruits and vegetables they learned in today’s class.

Using plastic replicas, the parents have shown their daughter the sign for peas and are now hiding the peas behind their back.  Eric now asks, “Do you want peas?” while doing the sign for peas. 

“We show it to her first and then we’ll do the sign for it,” says mom Corina Douglas. “We try to make sure that we get eye contact since we know that when she has eye contact then that means she can understand it better.”

They say the signs already seem to be helping out, especially at meal time.  When Claire wants more of something, she brings all her fingertips together using both hands.  She can also use this when wants more of something else, like playtime.  Corina Douglas says 11-month-old Claire speaks no words but knows four signs. 

Co-instructor Jennifer Chang says the class is built around the idea that babies know what they want from day one. 

“They cry and they cry because they want milk, because they want Mommy, but they don’t have any other tools aside from that until maybe about 12 months that’s usually when the first word comes,” she says.  “Physically to be able to move your hands and gesture comes a lot sooner than the mouth movements do.”

Babies can often learn signs as early as seven months old, according to Pennsylvania State University Professor Marilyn Daniels, who has been researching sign language in hearing populations for more than 15 years.

“The reason that it’s recalled so well is that any language you learn is stored in a separate memory store in the left hemisphere of the brain.” She says this means children can look to sign language when they can’t find the word for something in English.

Sign language first started to be used in the hearing community by special needs educators, who saw benefits for children with downs syndrome, autism, and verbal communication trouble, says Daniels.  American Sign Language is also used to help teach English as a second language to kids in countries like Japan.  Daniels is the author of Dancing with Words: Signing for Hearing Children’s Literacy.  She says early signing can bring educational benefits to hearing children and may help with reading.

“Children who used American Sign Language and learned it as pre-kindergarten or kindergarten would gain 20 percent larger vocabularies-and the size of a person’s vocabulary is the single best predictor of how well they’re going to do in school as far as children go.”

But some scholars, like John Hagen of the University of Michigan’s Society for Research in Child Development, say parents shouldn’t feel the need to favor signing classes over the variety of other childhood enrichment opportunities available to their children. Signing may have advantages for babies who learn it, he says, but “there are many things that babies and young children are exposed to and acquire and it’s a very fast developing period in their lives so we provide many things for them,” he says.

Baby sign instructors say their business has been growing in recent years, and several big baby sign companies say a growing number of instructors and products teaching baby sign classes have been offered in recent years.  Sign2Me, a major brand name of baby signing products, reports the number of instructors who teach their method nationally has grown fivefold in the last year.  One of the largest manufacturers of baby signing videos, We Sign, says they’ve seen a 400% increase in sales in the last few years. 

Classes range in prices but generally cost about $120 for a six-week session.  A handful of programs across the country are offering free or reduced cost classes so that low-income families can participate. Chang says her company, Keiki’s Corner, is hoping to soon develop classes for day care providers.