Baby Sign Language: Does It Work?

What if babies could tell us what they want, before they start crying for it? Bring in baby signing, a system of symbolic hand gestures for key works such as “milk,” “hot” and “all gone” that are taught to hearing babies as a way to communicate before they can talk. The sign for milk, for example, is made by opening and closing the hand, while the sign for “more” by tapping the ends of the fingers together. Now new research has reported that it’s even possible for babies to learn these signs just from viewing videos at home. The study found that babies learned to produce baby signs just as well from a video as they did if they were taught by their parents. Yet only those babies who had been taught the signs from a parent showed evidence of understanding what the signs meant. The bigger question is whether ...