Sign with Your Baby: How to Communicate with Infants Before They Can Speak

A guide for hearing parents demonstrates how they can teach their hearing infants to communicate with simple sign language gestures before they can speak

Foreword--Certain very important facts about human language have been known for many years. Two-thirds to three-quarters of all everyday language is ordinarily acquired by the third birthday. Also, in cases of poor educational performance, inadequate language ability is almost invariably present. What has not been known, surprisingly, is what exactly goes on during those first three years that underlies the acquisition of language. The reason for this strange state of affairs is that the research community has largely neglected the details of development during these early years. Recently, however, important progress has been made.

Even some thirty years ago reports appeared that indicated that children taught sign language had acquired about seventy-five signs by the time they were nine months old. In contrast, the typical child of that age could understand fewer than ten words, regardless of how bright she was.

This was a tantalizing though isolated finding. Until fairly recently, no one in developmental research followed up on this potentially important finding. Now two programs have. One of them is the subject of this book.

I recommend the teaching of signs, starting at about seven months of age, for several reasons. First, sign language represents a second language, and our research consistently showed that when a second language was introduced in an effective manner to a child from the early months on, the child would not only become bilingual by the second birthday, but would be ahead of the monolingual child in both languages! Indeed, that has been the experience of parents in our program.

Second, we have repeatedly found that children, especially boys, though developing well, have few or no spoken words at all until their second birthdays. We have also learned that the period between seventeen and twenty months of age is a particularly difficult time, in that the normal child is very limited in regard to frustration tolerance, and being unable to express himself exacerbates the problem. A child who can sign at that stage of life is a child who will cause considerably less frustration for himself and his parents. That means the attachment process can move along much more smoothly and probably to a better outcome.

Finally, the potential for understanding mental activity in children between eight and twenty-two months of age that is made possible by sign language is intriguing. Someday soon we will take advantage of this remarkable tool to get a much more refined picture of how the mind of a child evolves.

For all these reasons, and because his work is sound, I strongly recommend this groundbreaking work of Joseph Garcia.

Burton L. White, Ph.D., June 1998 Director, The Center for Parent Education Author, "The First Three Years of Life" and "Raising a Happy Unspoiled Child"

Communication, the backbone to a healthy relationship with your child

From the moment babies are born, these tiny human beings start communicating with the world around them. The vital connection between you and your infants depends on this communication. Infants will use extensive body language, facial expressions, and all sorts of verbal sounds to interact with you. These movements and sounds will eventually evolve into language. But until they do, you may have an incredibly difficult time understanding your infants' attempts to tell you things.

How many times have you wished you could look into your babies' minds and know what was going on in there? How many parents have felt the instinctual longing to extract a thought or a word from their troubled infants? The inability to understand your infants is certainly not because you don't try hard enough, nor is it because the infants abandon their attempts to express themselves. Infants have an instinctual need to communicate with you, just as you have an instinctual need to understand them. Infants are born with abundant intelligence. However, they have a limited means to let you know what their thoughts and needs are. Their undeveloped vocal cords restrict them from participating in the verbal language around them. Imagine how it must feel to be a baby who has many specific needs and thoughts to express, but has no effective way to make those specific needs or thoughts understood. At times, it must be frustrating for these small and socially dependent beings to live with these limitations.

Communication is one of the highest forms of social interaction. Leading researchers in infant behavior have determined that social interaction is crucial to all infants' development. They have further concluded that for a caregiver to withhold social responses to an infant's attempts to communicate is one of the most disruptive things that can occur in the infant's learning process.

What can you do to encourage this learning process? Here is where Sign with your Baby can contribute to your infants' development. Imagine how your babies might feel if one day you started using simple hand movements to communicate. Let's say you make a particular motion during a certain daily activity, such as eating. Soon your infants associate that movement with the situation or activity that was taking place when the motion was introduced. They begin to experiment with their own hands and discover they can replicate the movements you make. Receiving reinforcement from you, babies quickly learn that by making this motion, they can communicate their needs and wants. The time between birth and when your infants utter their first recognizable words can be a time of miscommunication or a time when your communication is less than precise. This does not have to be the case. These precious months can be rich in meaningful and effective infant/parent interaction. Using manual communication with your infants can help build a solid foundation for mutual understanding, dramatically contributing to the bonding process.