Hands Across America
Is baby sign language an essential or a rip-off?
by Pamela Paul
April 7, 2008
The popularity of baby signing can be largely attributed to the efforts of the psychologists Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn, cofounders of the Baby Signs Institute. In 1982, Acredolo taught her twelve-month-old daughter Katie how to sign, and together with Goodwyn, one of her graduate students at the time, she published a paper on how they fostered Katie's burgeoning skills. "I should say that Katie taught us," Acredolo told me. "She was so frustrated that she couldn't talk, she started using gestures. She spontaneously started making up signs." Katie would point to a rose bush and sniff. She would rub her fingers together to indicate the word spider. And so on.
In 1996, Acredolo and Goodwyn published their first book, Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk, which sold more than half a million copies. Baby Signs produced a burst of publicity as Acredolo and Goodwyn hit Oprah, the Today Show, Dateline NBC, 20/20, and Good Morning America and told their story to Newsweek and Parents magazine. By 2005, the Baby Signs Institute had trained seven hundred teachers. A series of books, DVDs, baby sign charts, flash cards, and even a puppet dubbed "BeeBo the Baby Signs Bear" followed. According to the Baby Signs Institute, teaching a baby to sign has remarkable emotional and social benefits: reducing tears, tantrums, and frustration; allowing babies to share their worlds; increasing respect for babies; strengthening the parent-infant bond; and boosting self-esteem and self-confidence — all things that parents, even those who aren't angling for a minigenius, are keen to encourage.
"Eat" photo: Heather Price
"More" photo: Ken Lin
"Cheese" photo: Nicki Bradley
Moreover, it purports that signing makes learning to talk easier and stimulates intellectual development.
"When babies are using signs, they pay more attention to what's going on around them in terms of language," explained Susan Goodwyn. "They're stimulating the language portion of the brain." To back up these claims, Acredolo and Goodwyn conducted a long-term study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, of 140 families. The results were astonishing. Babies taught to sign at eleven months tested eleven months ahead of other babies in terms of vocabulary and linguistic ability by age three. At age eight, signing babies scored higher on IQ tests than the control group. "You can increase your baby's IQ score, that's for sure," Goodwyn assured me. "And you increase your child's verbal development, which pays off in school."
Gesturing has been proven in lab studies to be a positive force for children who have developmental difficulties, and needless to say, it is crucial for hearing-impaired children. Still, that doesn't mean it benefits everyone. In 2005, researchers at the universities of Ottawa and Waterloo published a paper titled "Teaching Gestural Signs to Infants to Advance Child Development: A Review of the Evidence," which examined the claims made by baby-signing advocates. The scientists reviewed more than 1,200 studies and found that only ten actually measured objective outcomes in teaching signing as compared with groups of hearing babies. As for Acredolo and Goodwyn's celebrated research, the team uncovered several methodological problems.
According to one of the paper's authors, Cyne Johnston, Acredolo and Goodwyn failed to explain the methodology used to select and group their study's children. It may be, for example, that the parents in the baby-signing group were volunteers who were already highly motivated, educated, and involved, and thus likely to foster language development in their babies with or without signing classes. In addition to the baby-signing test group, there were two control groups: one in which parents received training to encourage verbal language skills with their babies; the other in which there was no intervention at all. But Acredolo and Goodwyn followed up with only one of the control groups — the babies with no intervention — which means that no long-term comparisons can be made between the parents who were trained to encourage spoken language and the parents who were trained to use sign language. It is possible that the verbally trained babies did just as well with language acquisition and IQ as the signing children, but the research doesn't say. Furthermore, the attrition rate in the follow-up study was as high as 40 percent. "When there's a high attrition rate, you wonder what happened to the other children and whether they were intrinsically different from the subjects they could find," Johnston told me.
©2008 Pamela Paul and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Pamela Paul is the author of Parenting, Inc., Pornified, and The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony and has written for Time, The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Psychology Today, Redbook, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Economist, and other publications. She and her family live in New York. |
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