My son knew about 30 signs, at the time he could say about 4-5 words. I don’t know if any anecdote is seen as any proof, but I will offer that he often made his needs / wants known to me without me having a way of guessing ahead of time. For example, he would alert me to things in a room or store that I hadn’t seen. If we were at a store, he would sign “ball” or “fish” to me and I would search around, and indeed there was a ball or fish over there that I had not seen before. He could also string signs together like “more eat” and “all done milk” way before he could say sentances.
I just followed the baby signs book and they never claim to boost intelligence or verbal skills, but they do claim that teaching baby signs will not delay verbal skills. They also claim it is common for children to make up their own signs, and my son did do that for “dog.” It took me a while to realize what the sign was, but he consistently made it when the dog appeared. When I would throw a ball for the dog, he would sign “dog ball”
I guess I could be misinterpreting him all along, or wishful thinking on my part could cloud my judgement, I am not above thinking this is possible. It just doesn’t seem likely. His day care provider and grandparents were able to understand his signs as well. If a child is offered crackers and pushes them away, then jarred baby food and pushes it away, then he makes a sign for milk and you give it to him and he accepts it, isn’t that a clear example of him communicating nonverbally? What am I missing here?
Y’know what’s REALLY subject to “facilitated communication”? Babies TALKING. Babies have trouble talking, hard to believe. And so they often have private words, their attempt to approximate the noises that adults make. My 18 month old can’t say “tomato”, but when she sees a tomato she’ll say “may-may!” and grab for it and if I put away the tomato she cries and if I give her the tomato she eats it. So was that facilitated communication? If a neutral third party heard her say “may-may”, would that neutral third party interpret that sound as a request to eat a tomato? Only if they knew that was her attempt to say “tomato”.
So how do I know what the baby is thinking when she says “baby” or “mama” or “daddy” or “uppy” or “wheeee” or “yes” or whatever? How do I know that when she says “baby”, she means the same thing I mean when I say “baby”? I mean, just because when she sees a picture of a baby and says baby, or when she sees a baby she’ll say baby, does that mean she knows the word “baby”?
Why is it easy to believe that when she says “baby” she means “baby” (or possibly teddy bear, or doll), but difficult to believe that when she puts her hands together she means “more”, or when she touches the top of her head she means “daddy”, or when she lifts both her hands she means “pick me up”, or when she turns her head away from proffered food she means “I don’t wanna eat that”?
Babies CAN communicate with adults, and it is clear that babies understand a lot more words than they can say. I can ask my 18 month old to go to the changing table and get a diaper and she’ll do it, but she can’t say the word “diaper”. I can ask her if she wants cheese, and she knows what that means, but she can’t say the word “cheese”. This is communication, and I can’t understand why this is supposed to set off anyone’s BS-o-meter,
That’s what I don’t get…a lot of times, such as in the examples you give, the baby seems to just make up his or her own “signs,” probably due to a certain level of frustration that they 1) Know what they want, 2) Can’t get it themselves, and 3) Can’t “say” it in words.
A lot of other times, we teach them signs (such as pointing and “bye-bye,” as SuaSponte mentioned), that are a normal part of human communication, and are easier to do than to vocalize.
Just because the signs are “made up” and deliberately taught to the child doesn’t mean it is a completely separate phenomenon than any of the above.
I recently read a list of communications milestones, and one of them is that by certain ages (I forget those ages at the moment), neutral third parties will be able to interpret 1/2 and 3/4 of the toddler’s words. So there is a distinct difference between “communicating verbally” and “speaking English.”
And of course, I know for a fact that just because she says a word, it doesn’t neccesarily correspond to what we adults imagine to be the meaning of that word. For example, a few months ago she stopped calling me “Da-Di” and started saying “Ma-Ma” at me. It’s not like she was confusing me with my wife, it’s just that she wasn’t using the word “Ma-Ma” as a name for a particular person, any more than “Baby” meant one particular baby. And whenever she sees a bird she says “Mak Mak”…because she has a toy duck, and we said “Quack Quack” when playing with the duck, and so she has the idea that “Mak Mak” is associated with birds–but she probably doesn’t have a mistaken concept that “Mak Mak” is the word for bird, but rather just that certain sounds or gestures and certain things are associated.
She’s gone back to calling me Daddy if anyone cares, but it was an interesting peek into the complexities of language acquisition.
But the whole point of this is that there’s no reason to be more suspicious of baby signs than there is to be suspicious of baby vocalizations. Why would you take the fact that a baby vocalized “Ba-Ba” at face value, but not a hand gesture? Why would you expect the Clever Hans effect when an adult signs “more”, but not when they say “more”?
With our little guy, it is obvious and provable that he knows more words than he can say. You can ask him questions like “point to your nose” and “point to dada’s nose” and he will comply every time; he knows the words for most body parts (that is, can point to them when asked), but can’t say the words out loud.
On the other hand, he hasn’t grasped the concept of opposites yet. He can say “up” when he wants to be picked up (accompanied by the gesture of lifting his hands in the air), but he says the exact same thing when he wants to be put down.
The strangest thing in his language acquisition is his babbling. He babbles in what sounds exactly like sentences, but aren’t; though every day they sound more like sentences, with real words! I could have sworn the other day he said “what’s that over there?”, when in all likelihood it was more like “Waa daa vaa dere?”
My mother has a PhD in Psychology/Language Development, and her dissertation was actually on a similar topic. She showed that children who are acquiring language will often apply the “next closest” word for something, if they don’t know the actual word for the thing itself…but that, at the same time they are not actually confusing the two things for each other. A simple example would be calling a cat “dog” because the child doesn’t know the word for “cat.” They know the cat is different from a dog, but they don’t have the language skills to differentiate it verbally.
Don’t ask me how mom proved that…I was in grammar school when she was doing it, and I must confess, I never read the whole thing!
That’s interesting to me, because one of the first things I ever heard my daughter say (that I could understand) was “what’s that?” It didn’t sound exactly like that, but she would say, “wasdat?” and point to something. We would tell her what it was, and she would point to something else and say “wasdat?”
Interesting that they do that…it actually seems like a deliberate attempt to acquire language. Damn, those little tykes are amazing when you think about everything they learn in, say, the first 3 years of life!
My toddler’s thing is “dis?” “dis?” She’ll point to things and ask what they are called. Toddlers love it if you take them around the house pointing at things and naming them.
I read somewhere that apparently random babbling is the growing human brain’s attempt to “crack” the code of language - sort of like how a computer might run through a lot of variations to arrive at the correct combination when attempting to solve a password problem.
It’s also interesting to note that babies vary in their approach to language; some of them babble in sentence-sounding utterances, and others concentrate on one word at a time.
