Baby Signing. Benefits of sign language for babies
In my work as a speech therapist in a Special Education center I meet children with significant language disorders, and one of the most effective ways to get them to understand and communicate in a functional way it is the use of gestures that accompany their language and ours. The use of gestures i
In my work as a speech therapist in a Special Education center I meet children with significant language disorders, and one of the most effective ways to get them to understand and communicate in a functional way it is the use of gestures that accompany their language and ours. The use of gestures in people with language disorders I will treat in another article to not extend too much.
This system known as Baby Signing, not only used with babies with language problems, but it is beneficial for all types of babies.
I'll tell you about the benefits of sign language for babies.
Benefits of sign language for babies or Baby Signing
In recent years, what is commonly called baby signing has become fashionable. It consists of the use of simple and easy gestures to learn, between parents and hearing babies, with the aim of stimulating and clarifying the early communication between them before the verbal language desarrol develops. This current emerged in the United States with the psychologists Susan Goodwyn and Linda Acredolo in the 90s with its Baby signs program.There is another proposal in the same years of an educator, Joseph García, who raises the idea of using gestures to stimulate the baby's communication and as a way to access a second language. For this he developed a program called
Sign with your Baby that has a lot of diffusion in the United States, England, Canada and Spain. These authors defend the idea that facilitating
baby communication through gestures provides four benefits for the child. Benefits of speaking to the child with sign language
1- Reduce tantrums and frustration at times when they can not communicate what they want or what they feel before they can speak.
2- It is a way of fostering the bond with the child, an emotional connection is established between the baby and his parents through communication.
3- Accelerates the development of verbal language.
4- Increase the intelligence quotient.
Baby signing is based on the idea that babies, before they start talking, have motor skills, imitation skills and
understanding of their environment that can allow them to communicate through gestures. There is evidence that
gestures stimulate and do not hinder the development of language. The execution of the first gestures of a child depends on several factors such as the development of memory, attention and imitation, the frequency with which parents model gestures or simply for the interest of the child to communicate. There are studies that reveal that the use of gestures in the first two years of life facilitates, precedes and complements the development of subsequent language milestones.
These data open a very important way of language stimulation through gestures in young children especially when the verbal language is not developed.
