Baby Sign Language - Developmental Research

Developmental Research

Joseph Garcia, an American Sign Language (ASL) interpreter and a leading proponent of use of ASL in communicating with infants and toddlers, began with his graduate thesis in 1986, an analysis of the role sign language could play in early childhood language acquisition. His research indicated babies who are exposed to signs regularly and consistently at six to seven months of age can begin using signs effectively by the eighth or ninth month.

Research by Bonvillian & Folven indicates that children raised in a signing environment produce their first signs at a mean age of 8.2 months, whereas Capute et al. found a mean age of 11.3 months for the production of the first word in speaking children. This acquisition advantage has been found to extend to multi-word and multi-sign milestones as well. Signing children acquired 10 sign vocabularies at a mean age of 13.1 months, compared with 10 word vocabularies at a mean age of 15.1 months for speaking children. Milestones of 50 signs and 50 words were acquired at mean ages of 18 months and 19.6 months respectively.

Two-sign combinations were first produced at a mean age of 17.1 months, while two-word combinations were first produced between 18 and 24 months. Acquisition of morphology or inflection was not found to differ greatly between signing and speaking children.

In 1998, a program was conducted at A. Sophie Rogers Infant-Toddler Laboratory School in Ohio State University by Kimberlee Whaley. Infants as young as 9 months old and their teachers began to learn to use some signs from the American Sign Language to communicate with each other. The program was not intended to teach American Sign Language, rather to use signs to communicate effectively. The program found that children would use the signs they learned in the classroom at home. Another finding indicated that girls use signs more than boys.