More on Baby signs

[Kathi Kohnert-Rice]

1.Another resource for parents and professionals on teaching ASL to babies
published a couple of years ago is:
	Toddler Talk: The First Signs of Intelligent Life by Joseph Garcia

	(This is directed at parents of young children who are developing
communication skills normally. It also has a video-tape of the author
performing simple signs- the research claim, if I recall correctly, is that
using signs may actually accelerate oral lang . . . )

2.Within the field of Speech-Lang. Path., it has become quite common
practice to use signs (ASL) with toddlers and young preschool children with
limited expressive vocabularies . . . a big reason, as noted by Mary
Hunt-Berg, is to reduce frustration (for both parent & child) by increasing
the child's ability to communicate wants & needs proactively. This is
another reason to use it with pre-verbal children who are developing
normally . ..

3. I began using a few choice signs with my son when he was ~8 months old.
Prior to age 1, he used about 10 different signs consistently - he of
course stopped using signs when the verbal skills became more efficient at
about 16-18 months. The signs made for lots of good early easy to read
communication between us. He's 4 now with great language (& communication!)
skills . . . although I'm sure there's no causal relationship here.

 I have found using signs with young children with limited expressive
language skills very useful both professionally and personally . . . for
facilitating communication (but not accelerating oral language per se).


-Kathi


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Kathryn Kohnert, M.A., CCC-SLP
Joint Docotral Program Language & Communicative Disorders
San Diego State University; University of California, San Diego
Center for Research in Language
9500 Gilman Dr, Dept. 0526
La Jolla, CA. 92093-0526