Signing Time Promotes Earlier Speech Development

Welcome back to Babylicious! Thanks for visiting again. If you've enjoyed reading my blog, subscribe to my RSS feed to get regular updates on what's new at Babylicious.

When I was in University, we studied child development in our psychology lectures so we could learn how to manage children of different ages in the dental clinic.  Although I memorised this information for my exams, I confess I’ve long forgotten the average timeline of milestones for children.  Since I wasn’t particularly interested in paediatric dentistry and rarely saw children in my clinic (after that spell I did in the paediatric clinic when I was still a student), I didn’t really need the information on hand.

It wasn’t until I was pregnant with Gavin that I started to read up about child development.  Gavin being my first child and having a lot of things to remember, average age for specific milestone achievements weren’t especially high on my list.  So long as he was learning new things and developing normally, I was pretty content.

Of course that didn’t stop me from looking for new materials and tools to help Gavin’s development -- such as those flash cards I made for him and the Signing Time DVDs I bought for him.  I believe that at this young age, a child’s potential for learning is at it’s maximum and not to utilise this advantage is a poor waste of your child’s resources.  Anything that helps to establish a strong foundation for later life is always worth the investment of time to do it right from the beginning.

As any mother would be of her own child, I’ve always been proud of all of Gavin’s achievements -- no matter how big or small.  That I should think my son is intelligent, handsome and charming is only to be expected because I am his mother and I harbour the natural biasses of a mother.  So when hubby and I receive comments from friends, family and other acquaintances expressing their surprise at the pace of Gavin’s speech development, I did stop and wonder whether he really is advanced for his age.

Just looking at the timeline for the average speech and language development of a child seems to confirm that Gavin is ahead of the average in this area.  For instance, this is what the average 2 year old should have achieved:

• Expressive vocabulary of 150-300 words.
• Uses short incomplete sentences.
• Uses many different consonant sounds in the beginning of words.
• Puts many actions together during play like stirring, pouring, scooping, and feeding a doll.
• Points to pictures in a book when named and listens to simple stories.
• Learns a few new words each week.
• Understands simple questions (“Where’s your shoe”).

Gavin is 22 months old and he has hit all of these for a number of months already.  I think I have to thank the Baby Sign Language DVDs that I exposed Gavin to since he was about 5 months old for this advanced development.

When a few of my relatives heard I was teaching Gavin Sign Language to help him communicate with me and express his wants, they believed that learning Sign would delay his speech development.  The premise was that if he could already communicate using Sign, he would have no incentive to learn how to talk.  Despite my telling them that observations on infants learning Sign found that this was not so, I think they were still somewhat doubtful.

Well, it looks like my study of one confirms that learning Sign does not delay speech development, but advances it.  And this is just the results of my showing him a couple of DVDs and signing to him on the odd occasion when I could remember.  I wonder what his development might be like if I had been more dedicated to teaching him Sign?  I’ll let you know with baby no. 2.

Now that Gavin can speak, I still find the new Signing Time DVDs I bought to be very useful.  Aside from the fact that they are the only other series that Gavin enjoys watching aside from Thomas and Friends, he also learns a lot of new words and concepts by watching it.  For instance, he now knows a lot of names for animals where previously he wasn’t really interested to learn about them.

Because the format of Signing Time shows the word, associated pictures, the sign for the word and accompanies it with music, the DVDs are educational in other ways beyond the teaching of Sign.  For instance, when teaching the word “tiger”, they show a picture of a tiger, the written word “tiger”, how to sign “tiger” and then a series of shots showing children signing the word “tiger” and more visuals of tigers.

Currently, Gavin’s favourite DVDs from the Signing Time collection would have to be:

The Zoo Train -- below is one of the songs from the Zoo Train called “Walking Thru the Zoo”:

Time to Eat -- below is a video of one of the songs from this volume:

My Favourite Things -- below is a song from this volume called “Colours of the Rainbow”:

What are the benefits of teaching your baby to sign?

• reduces tantrums and frustration from not being able to express needs (thus making the stage of the “terrible twos” a little easier)
• promotes language acquisition
• reinforces existing language skills
• increases rate of spatial reasoning development
• develops understanding of language for communicating emotions
• may increase IQ
• increases creative thinking
• teaches a second language (ASL is a formally recognised language)
• increases early literacy skills

As the hubby says, baby no. 2 benefits from everything we’re learning through raising Gavin.  Now that I know how effective Signing Time has been, I’ll be sure to be more dedicated when it comes to teaching baby no. 2 how to sign.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Other posts that might interest you:

• Learn to Sing with Signing Time
• Growing Older and More Cooperative?
• Learning New Words with Signing Time
• New Signs, New Words
• Getting Past the Terrible Twos

What is RSS? How do I subscribe via RSS?