Do you think that baby signing is useful for language development? Why or why not?

Answers will vary with students, depending on whether they think baby signing is helpful for language development or not. Proponents of baby signing think it promotes early communication between infants and parents by teaching infants to communicate with symbolic gestures. The assumption behind baby signing is that the cognitive and gross motor skills needed for signing develop before the relatively fine motor control of the mouth, tongue, and breath needed to articulate speech. The roots of baby signing lie in research conducted by Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn. Their research has shown that babies readily acquire symbolic gestures when exposed to the enhanced gestural training that they refer to as baby signs . They propose that the rewards of baby signing include larger and more expressive vocabulary, advanced mental development, improved parent–child relationships, and fewer tantrums and behavior problems. Based on their findings, Acredolo and Goodwyn created a signing program for infants with videos, classes, books, and cue cards. Parents who read about the benefits of teaching signs to their infants often embrace the practice. Many parents report that baby signing has improved their child’s ability to communicate, cognitive ability, and overall parent–infant interac-tions.
On the other hand, there is almost no evidence to support these claims. Those that did referred to case studies and opinion articles rather than experiments. A review of research studies examining the outcomes of baby signing programs found that although some of the studies suggested some benefits, nearly all contained methodological weaknesses such as a lack of control groups or no random as-signment. It was concluded that evidence to support these claims was insufficient. More recently, a longitudinal study tested the effects of baby signing products. Infants were followed from 8 months of age until 20 months of age. Babies were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: baby sign training, verbal training (i.e., mothers modeled words without signs), and nonintervention. At 20 months of age, the language development was similar for all babies, regardless of intervention. Encouraging gestures did not result in higher scores on language measures, providing no support for the claims of baby signing proponents.