A gesture says more than words: Sign language for babies

By Christiane Loell Dec 12, 2011, 3:06 GMT

Hamburg - The use of sign language as a way to to communicate with babies and toddlers has grown in the past few years, but whether it helps children learn to speak at an earlier age has not been proven definitively.

Sign language is common among deaf children, but now courses have been designed for hearing children and their parents, covering dozens of gestures starting with basic words like drink, sleep and eat.

'It surprised me that I could remember everything, but at the end of the course I could do more than 60 gestures,' said Bettina Crysandt, a business consultant in Germany who took a course with her 9-month-old daughter. She learned gestures for eating, drinking, driving and for animals, which children like especially well.

Courses such as these are relatively new and complement others such as baby massage and mother-baby gymnastics.

While parents who participate tend to be enthusiastic about the sign language programmes, researchers are more cautious about what they can expect from baby sign language.

Crysandt's course met six times, with each session lasting 45 minutes. The concept was developed by Wiebke Gericke, who has a masters degree in education. Her area of specialty is early childhood intervention for the children of deaf parents.

'In my area of study I observed that these children were able to do gestures at a very early age,' said Gericke.

She developed the concept for the course, and started offering it under the name BabySignal in 2005. Since then it has grown to include 50 course instructors in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

'About 4,000 parents have attended one of our courses,' said Gericke.

Gericke knows that she is profiting from the current trend of offering early education to children. To avoid any misunderstanding, she said there were a few important things to understand about her educational concept.

'We instruct parents, not the children,' she said. 'It isn't about learning a second language, rather supporting spoken words using gestures.'

Children have the ability to control their hands far earlier than they can control their voices, breathing and vocal cords. Toddlers can do gestures before they can speak or when pronunciation is difficult for them. Many people believe baby sign language leads to better or faster language development.

Developmental psychologist Mechthild Kiegelmann has taken a look at popular baby sign language through her own studies. She wrote about it in a contribution to a German magazine for deaf people.

After reviewing the latest research and taking into account her own empirical studies, she wrote that 'it is not yet possible to evaluate the developmental and psychological significance of baby sign language.'

In her view, however, there is no clear indication that it has a negative influence on development.

A similar conclusion was reached by Ulf Liszkowski, director of a research group at the Max Planck Institute for psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Holland, studying communication prior to speech development.

'Speech begins at different ages, just as children begin to walk at different ages,' Liszkowski said.

'After evaluation of available studies there is no unambiguous affirmative answer that there is proof of faster language acquisition,' he said.