Doctor's orders: Believe in the research!

Dr. Acredolo, the author and co-founder of The Baby Signs Program, recently shared the following information with her family of Independent Certified Instructors, and I thought it was worth sharing here.  If you have ever wondered about the research base of the program, here is even more proof of the validity of teaching babies to use sign language and gesturing.....    There is an exciting new study that appeared in this month's prestigious journal, Science.  In the study, conducted at the University of Chicago, researchers found that gesturing by parents and their babies at 14 months was significantly predictive of better verbal vocabulary at 54 months.  The study revealed that middle-class moms and babies engaged in significantly more gesturing than those from low-income families. The researchers end with the suggestion that encouraging gesturing may be a way to help close the achievement gap between low- and middle-income children.   Instead of signing, the researchers' focus was on a cognitively simpler form of non-verbal communication--pointing. Although they were not looking at signing per se, their findings have clear relevance to our work.  Here are just some of the ways that their findings apply to us:   Parents who model signs also, almost automatically, point to the object.  In fact, the "10 Steps to Success" on our Quick Reference Guide includes advice to do so as tip #4.   Babies also often point at an object when they sign.   Signing increases a child's tendency to watch his/her parent's hands, thereby increasing the chance the child will notice the parent's pointing and recognize its relevance.    The authors are interpreting pointing as conveying meaning ("e.g., pointing at a dog = dog").  Signs are even more sophisticated ways of conveying meaning and, therefore, even more closely linked to learning words. In fact, the authors seem to be, pardon the pun, "taking the words right out of our mouths" when they suggest that "Gesture could also play a more direct role in word learning by giving children an opportunity to practice generating particular meanings by hand, at a time when those meanings are difficult to produce by mouth. "   They suggest that the positive relationship to verbal development may in part be due to the fact that parents respond to points with appropriate words and, since the child has chosen the topic, the child is more likely to listen and learn.  Well, as we all know, the same can be said of signing--in spades!    In other words, the results of this study clearly support our contention that encouraging families to use signs is an easy and effective way to help foster verbal language development.  And we're not the only ones to think so!  Check out what Ann Pleshette Murphy had to say on Good Morning America: It's No Charade: Baby Gestures Could Help Speaking.   And, for those of you who have to deal with those who argue that any non-ASL signing is harmful to children, this study, showing as it does have a positive relationship between pointing and verbal development, provides a perfect counter-argument.