It is a widely-made observation among language acquisition specialists that babies who are deaf and/or whose parents are deaf frequently sign their first word at a much earlier age than hearing children speak theirs. The average age at which hearing children say their first word is about 12 months, whilst deaf children have been known to make their first meaningful sign as young as 3 months old. According to this article published in today's Sun newspaper that 'record' has now been broken by a two-month-old baby who reportedly makes the sign for 'milk' when she is hungry.
It is not entirely clear why deaf babies generally sign earlier than hearing babies speak, but for my money one of the most plausible arguments centres on issues to do with basic articulation: as a baby having to learn how to control the various parts of your own body, it is arguably far easier to co-ordinate your hands and make meaningful signs than it is to position all of the 'precision apparatus' that makes up your vocal tract (tongue, teeth, lips etc.) and make accurate, meaningful speech sounds.
2 comments:
Could it be that signing is a more natural form of communication for humans than language is?
If language is a relatively recently evolved feature of human interaction then pre-language communication would have been, I assume, based on signing. Signing would be easier for babies to use than language as it is a skill that is not as developed or as complicated.
Something else that comes to mind is the Social Learning theory (which is the theory that any behaviour that results in a rewarding consequence is more likely to be repeated in the future). If the baby sees her parents using the sign and she then gets fed she'll associate the sign with the reward of milk. When she then uses the sign and gets re-rewarded her behaviour becomes reinforced. This would also mean that she has worked out that other hand signs don't produce the same reward, which is very clever for a two month old baby!
Interesting points Jeremy - your observation about signing as a pre-linguistic tool for communication makes a lot of sense. As for the Social Learning Theory, this is actually one of the four main theories of language acquisition that we'll be looking at this year (although linguists tend to call it the Imitation and Reinforcement Theory). According to the theory the reinforcement (by reward) of the appropriate hand gesture would indeed result in the baby repeateing this gesture... but in my view this still doesn't tell us why the use of the sign comes before the use of the word - surely the principle of reinforcement works for both gesture and word? Hmmm....
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