Sign language is being promoted as a way to improve communication between young babies and their parents

SIOBHÁN MURRAY cannot remember her son Charlie, who turns three next month, ever having a tantrum. Either she has a very selective memory or he is an extraordinary child.

Or maybe, as she believes, the fact that he started to use sign language from the age of five months helped them avoid frustrating misunderstandings. Signing is promoted as a way for babies to communicate better before they can talk.

“He is a wild little monkey but he has always been able to communicate, so there wasn’t that angst of not being able to say what was wrong,” explains Murray, who now teaches baby signing.

We know that babies begin to get a grasp of what is going on in the world around them long before they can start articulating their thoughts. Personally, I am always amazed at how good they are at getting their message across.

Advocates of signing say it gives babies a way of talking with their hands from the age of about six to nine months – up to a year ahead of their ability to co-ordinate tongue, lips and teeth to speak recognisable language. The adult should always say the word along with the sign; this pairing, it is argued, helps early speech development.

Murray had never heard of baby signing until she was on holiday in Spain in 2007, with infant Charlie and his older brother, Seán. She met an English mother there, with three children under five, who told her she taught baby signing.

Curious to learn more, Murray researched the subject when she got home to Dublin. While there was information from the US and UK, she could not find anything about classes in Ireland. She bought a book from Tiny Talk, which runs baby-signing classes in the UK, to teach herself and her two boys.

Seán, who was 18 months old at the time, was signing within a week, and Charlie soon followed suit. Murray was so impressed with the results she saw an opportunity not only to spread the word about something she believed in but also to change her lifestyle.

A single mother and working as communications manager with McDonald’s, she had been on the lookout for an alternative to dropping her children at a creche at 8.30am and not seeing them until 6pm. So she applied to bring the Tiny Talk franchise to Ireland.

It is 11am on a Friday morning and Murray is sitting cross-legged on a multicoloured, striped rug in a south Dublin community centre, among a circle of 10 mothers and their babies. She is leading them in songs and rhymes, accompanied by signing of key words. The children, ranging in age from seven months to 23 months, watch entranced while their mothers do all the actions.

The little tots certainly won’t sign to order. As a spectator, it is a bit like being a wildlife watcher: you have got to be patient if you want to catch sight of the fleeting gestures. A cheer goes up when one boy makes the sign for “book” with his hands, and later a girl does a perfect, one-handed “duck” gesture at the appropriate moment.

Both are veterans of this group in Mount Merrion, some of whom have been coming for more than a year. Clearly the social interaction and fun for both mothers and babies is partly what keeps bringing them back after the initial six or 12-week programme. Murray has recently done further training so she can start a toddler group.

The first half of the hour-long session consists of songs and rhymes, varied between seated and standing. It concludes with musical instruments being distributed for a final, enthusiastic “rattle-along”, before a half hour of chat and refreshments.

Some of the songs have no signs in them because if they were to do 30 solid minutes of signing it would be overkill, says Murray. The classes focus on teaching the parents so that they can sign, along with spoken words, at home.

Zoe Bayly-Parker (14 months) has been coming since she was 11 weeks old and uses quite a lot of signing at home, according to her mother Kirsten. At five months she started signing for milk – squeezing one hand as if milking a cow – which became a useful indicator that she was hungry.

“It definitely has stopped a lot of temper tantrums,” says Kirsten because she has a better idea of what Zoe wants. She teaches signs not only to her husband Chris, but also to Zoe’s grandparents and anybody else who is caring for her

Interest in baby signing started to grow in the US in the 1980s, in the wake of two research projects. Firstly scientist Joseph Garcia, who worked as an interpreter in the deaf community, had noticed how the hearing offspring of signing deaf parents began to use signing long before their spoken language developed.

Garcia started to research the use of American Sign Language (ASL) with hearing babies and concluded that those who were consistently exposed to signs at six to seven months of age could begin expressive communication by their eighth or ninth month.

Meanwhile, Drs Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn of California University conducted a longitudinal study funded by the US National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. They found that signing babies understood more words, had larger vocabularies and engaged in more sophisticated play than non-signing babies. Parents of signing babies reported decreased frustration, increased communication, and enriched parent-infant bonding. Signing babies also displayed an increased interest in books.

Acredolo and Goodwyn revisited the families when the children were seven and eight years old and found that the children who signed as babies had a mean IQ of 114 compared with the non-signing control group’s mean of 102.

While Garcia promoted the use of a standard sign language, such as ASL, Acredolo and Goodwyn believed that parents and infants could make up their own signs.

Lorna McCormack, founder of Simply Signing in Swords, Co Dublin, advocates the use of Irish Sign Language (ISL) for all children up to the age of six. “We try not to tag onto the baby-signing phenomenon because we are more than that,” she explains. “We are about supporting education.”

Having worked in the deaf community for some years, McCormack started the business to offer early intervention for deaf children. Her husband, Geoffrey, is deaf and she had also seen the benefit of signing for their two hearing children, Connor (4) and Anna (18 months).

However, she says she was surprised at the level of interest outside the deaf community. Now Simply Signing focuses on using ISL to support early literacy among children, teaching parents and professionals how to use it.

There is growing interest among creches and primary schools, she says, in the use of signing as a way of reinforcing early literacy education. “Once you have the visual element in teaching children how to read, children pick it up quicker. If you introduce children to finger spelling ‘cat’ and ‘bat’, it’s multi-sensory, and they learn to spell quicker.”

Simply Signing runs a programme for parents and toddlers, consisting of an hour a week for five weeks. McCormack published a book of 224 signs which are taught in these classes along with songs and other activities. Simply Signing also offers resource packs to enable people outside Dublin to teach themselves.

ISL is quite complicated, so a young child is not going to be able to learn it all, she explains. They learn in stages.

“We always say start with the sign for milk because that is their whole lives! After that it all relates to the child’s interests.”

A common mistake by parents doing signing on their own is to forget to use their voice as well. “You never sign without your voice,” McCormack stresses. “The idea is to support the transition into speaking. With sign and speech, children actually speak a lot sooner than their peers.”

She believes the use of British Sign Language (BSL) in baby-signing classes here that are based on UK models, such as Tiny Talk, instead of ISL, could be confusing, especially if signing is moving into creches. “It is like introducing Japanese in France,” she suggests. “I would not encourage it.”

However, Murray does not believe this is an issue for her baby-signing classes. “The reason it is based on BSL is that it is the simplest level of signing,” she says. It could have even been based on a “madey-up” system, she adds, as it is not about teaching the children full sign language but about helping communication skills.

BABY TALK: ‘SPEECH DEVELOPMENT IS MORE IMPORTANT FOR EARLY LITERACY’

THERE IS no research to show the benefit of baby signing for speech in a normally developing child, according to Dr Ciara O’Toole, a lecturer in speech and language therapy at University College, Cork. But she says there is evidence that it can help with learning difficulties.

Commenting on behalf of the Irish Association of Speech and Language Therapists, she says parents of typically developing children do not need to spend money attending workshops or buying DVDs.

“Parents should certainly be focusing on gestures, and pointing is a really important pre-verbal communication skill with babies,” she explains. But parents can use gestures they already know and which come naturally to them.

“However, when we know of children who are identified at birth as being at risk of speech difficulties, such as those with Down syndrome, there is research to show that it does support the speech and language development of those children. It helps build the transition between non-verbal communication and verbal speech.”

There is no evidence either to support the idea that baby signing will accelerate literacy, she says. “Speech development is much more important for early literacy skills, like singing songs and rhyming and playing games like I-spy once the child has developed some verbal communication.”

The most important thing for early literacy is the child learning letter names and phonological awareness, which is knowing how words are made up, such as how they rhyme or start with the same letter, she explains.

“I suppose the idea is if the children speak earlier, then maybe that will have later effects on literacy. We do know that children who are later to talk are at risk of developing later literacy, but it is more to do with the verbal communication than the gestures.”

She acknowledges that signing encourages parents to get down to the child’s level and have face-to-face interaction, focusing on what the child is doing and what messages they are trying to communicate.

“That will certainly have a benefit,” O’Toole adds, “but it is not the actual sign they use per se.”

TINY TALK: PARENTS HAVE THEIR SAY

At her 18-month check-up, she did the vocabulary test for a three year old. I think signing gave her a real head start– Sarah Lynch, mother of Freya Keogh (23 months)

She loves it. It is the highlight of her week– Kate Leach, mother of Charlotte (seven months)

They absorb it when they're here, and it comes out at random times– Eleanor Yates, mother of Isla (13 months).

She has been coming since she was 11 weeks old and at five months she signed for milk. It has definitely stopped a lot of temper tantrums– Kirsten Bayly-Parker, mother of Zoe (14 months)

It helped me realise as a first-time mum the amount he was comprehending, and it encourages us to talk and interact more with him– Aoife O'Sullivan, mother of Traolacht (19 months)

For more information, see www.tinytalk.co.uk and www.simplysigning.ie

swayman@irishtimes.com