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Baby Sign Language

AlaskaBushPilot

Illuminator
Joined
Nov 6, 2010
Messages
4,341
We've looked around quite a bit for advanced early infant learning and pre-school materials & methods, and ran across this, something we overlooked:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3y0ahkVfaE

I don't know why the parents pretend they didn't teach this child to read when both of them are speech therapists and they acknowledge teaching sign language from "day 1". She also watched a sign language show, and the show had a quick-cut of them teaching children how to sign the letter "B". So they "didn't teach her how to read" only in the sense that they taught her the American Sign Language alphabet, how letters look and sound, how they form words - no actual reading instruction lol.

Nevertheless we're advocates of early infant learning, especially reading, so although we missed this opportunity I think it makes sense. Here's the Mayo Clinic weighing in on it:

http://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/infant-and-toddler-health/expert-answers/baby-sign-language/faq-20057980

There are commercial baby sign language packages out there pretty cheap, Mayo is pointing out that basing even your own on the American Sign Language - it's going to get good results, or if you have a learning disabilities problem it can be a breakthrough for communication.

One of the reasons this works is that the instant a baby realizes it has the power of communication, that new words can be learned by asking, it gives birth to the Dawn of Active Thought. There is a locomotor component to this too, one we knew about. It had spectacular results for us. But this really looks like something I would have liked to have known about.
 
The Mayo link is pretty good. They do say this though:
"Further research is needed, however, to determine if baby sign language promotes advanced language, literacy or cognition."
 
We used baby sign with our kids. It works great to give them a few clear and unambiguous communications early,

BUT

I don't think it gives a clear and unambiguous advantage in language generally. I watched RocketBoy1.0 actively unlearn baby sign words to make room for verbal language when he started talking.

All my kids read an absurd number of grade levels above current age, and I attribute this more to the fact that I raised them myself rather than foisting off the job on strangers, which meant I had the time to use a lot of nouns and verbs with them in reference to the world they were observing. And I read "Go Dog Go" to each of them about 4000 times apiece. I would give "Go Dog Go" in several translations to aliens who want to learn earthling languages and how we think.

RocketGirl was part of a toddler study involving a voice recording vest to study the words toddlers are exposed to, and recently was paid $50 (plus $75 to mom for bringing her in) for a ten-years-later follow up.

Continuous attentive parenting. That's how we did it.
 
Baby Sign Language is one of those things that sounds like all the other hippy-dippy nonsense modern parents get inundated with, but actually is a pretty good idea. It'll give the kid a small but vital vocabulary - "hungry," "thirsty," "more/again," etc - six months or more before they can enunciate the same concepts. That's six months during which the only alternative for the kid is to scream until the grownups work out what they want through elimination.

Whether or not it has any long-term benefits, it's worth it for the parental sanity alone.
 
I couldn't agree more. Our oldest is six and is testing 8 years ahead of his cohorts in reading. We taught him Microsoft Excel at four years old and it has made it possible for him to learn algebra as a six year old and very basic calculus. There is an article in The Atlantic on teaching calculus to five year olds that we very much agree with.

Here is a youtube video of a seven month old doing the "My Baby Can Read" program:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsrxyOqSM4A

We looked into that program and disagreed with the "look and say" method in preference to phonics. What's important is both parents are extremely enthusiastic about their kid learning.

Frankly, I think the reason you have this black couple on Youtube getting snarky comments about her boobs and the white couple is on national TV despite their child being ten months OLDER than the black child is simple bigotry.

With me, this couple gets high marks despite us being against "look and say" reading because they are "continuous active parenting". It sure beats the heck out of not teaching!

The message with the black couple is VERY different from the white couple. The white couple is insisting on having "reasonable expectations", and poo-pooing the idea that other people can do just as well as them. The black couple is more like us: it isn't a big deal, almost any set of parents can have their children reading many years ahead. All they have to do is teach. Infuse them with enthusiasm about learning.

The black parents aren't liars. They're showing exactly how they're doing it. The white mom has this absurd line about not teaching their kid, and one day out of the blue they are walking in the grocery store listening to their daughter read cereal boxes. Why be so deceptive? They're putting the emphasis on their kid being a natural born genius.

The black couple obviously can't compete with two speech therapists for speaking ability. But you can read before you can speak and the black child at 7 months old is already learning. Ten months more training and she'll be comparable to the white child in terms of reading. The white child is 17 months on the TV show.

What struck me about the sign language is first the ease of introducing it at a far younger age. I may not have emphasized strongly enough that the thing you need to do is get your kid THINKING earlier. Language does that, and sign language can be taught so much earlier. If your kid is effectively one standard deviation higher in IQ already, then he is going to learn everything faster.

If you get the brain working at one month old instead of five months old then by five months old you have widened the gap to a year. By two years old you have widened the gap to five years. By five years old your competition is just entering kindergarten. Yours is reading at the high school level. We know, because ours is. We see the articles on parents who have kids graduating high school at age 10, college degrees by 11 - it isn't because they started with their age cohorts in Kindergarten. They were all many years ahead by the start of kindergarten.

There is a component of language assembly in ASL - letters into words, words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs i.e. sets of related ideas. So even if you drop sign language altogether after their speech physiology advances far enough, a lot of things are going to be much easier to learn with speech that follows the same rules.

It's clear to us that by far the easiest thing to do in re-establishing educational primacy over our international competition is to start earlier. There are places finishing high school three years ahead in reading, four years ahead in math - and you can't make up for that kind of gap by starting in 10th grade or even 5th grade. If you come into kindergarten years ahead of them, the problem is over.

Our culture though is very strongly against this approach, namely getting the jump on everyone else.
 
Thanks for bringing up the topic as I had not heard of baby sign language before - or at least I thought I had not, but a quick look at Wikipedia reminds me that it appeared in that classic comedy Meet the Fockers.

I would be interested to know how much independent verification this has had in the peer-reviewed literature, and to the extent that baby sign language promotes long-term development. The Wikipedia page on claims for its benefits tends to be from baby sign language advocacy sites (or businesses involved in this).

However, I have scanned a few pages from Michael Tomasello's book Constructing a Language (2003) which is a book about usage-based language acquisition.

He argues - or perhaps summarizes the literature on the subject - that babies make three types of gestures prior to making intelligible verbal communication:

1) ritualizations
2) deitic gestures
3) symbolic gestures

I'll provide the scanned pages here. Hopefully they will be legible:
 

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I read that thanks and it isn't quite oriented the way we want, namely the effect of training as opposed to the instinctual kinds of ways infants tend to communicate on their own.

If there are short term benefits, namely facilitating communication between parent and child, it is something to promote regardless of whether it has a long term benefit or not.

It is clear to us that you have some people who are doing the baby sign language only to solve a short term problem - they don't want the baby to cry as much or the parent to be frustrated so they do this. They don't do anything else unusual for the rest of the child's education. Whatever benefit there was 16 years ago has dissipated by the end of High School.

But for another parent who is looking for a long-term integrated program of advanced development - this is just the kind of age-appropriate tactic that in combination with others makes for astonishing long term differences. Instead of dropping the ball like the parents above, the parents go right into extending learning, adding phonics, and have their kid graduating grade school before they are kindergarten age.

One huge reason there aren't large scale and long term studies being done is because all of the dollars have been traditionally aimed to at-risk kids. This is changing somewhat now as talented and gifted programs have been added but the overwhelming policy emphasis is on getting the slow kids past some arbitrary standard, not fielding the strongest team. A Teach to the Bottom philosophy.

There aren't any infant-to-preschool programs on how to produce geniuses out of half your population. Because we view this as social injustice: the other half was far enough behind as it was. Now you want to triple the gap? A "How to Make the Rich Even Richer" program.

There are intractable cultural issues with education in America.
 
It is clear to us that you have some people who are doing the baby sign language only to solve a short term problem - they don't want the baby to cry as much or the parent to be frustrated so they do this. They don't do anything else unusual for the rest of the child's education. Whatever benefit there was 16 years ago has dissipated by the end of High School.

But for another parent who is looking for a long-term integrated program of advanced development - this is just the kind of age-appropriate tactic that in combination with others makes for astonishing long term differences. Instead of dropping the ball like the parents above, the parents go right into extending learning, adding phonics, and have their kid graduating grade school before they are kindergarten age.

The question I don't think gets asked enough is, "What is the goal and why?"

For your first example, it seems plain: I want to communicate with my kid as early as possible to lessen frustration - presumably, the kid is still pre-verbal and the signing is an early alternative. But what about your second example where the kid finishes her education years before the herd. What's the point?

The assumption seems to be "it's better." Somehow. As a skeptic, I'd want to know why it's thought to be better. Deep and strange is the Alchemy used to shape an adult from plastic child.
 
lol. It must really eat at you - that we don't have to justify how highly we value education.

There are plenty of parallels, things a parent might value, selecting one path over another. Sports, music, religion - plenty of ways to bend the twig. Impress your friends at parties when the youngster recites Deuteronomy verbatim or expertly fillets and grills a catfish they caught using an authentic Inuit whale-bone-tipped spear.

It's not so much which step they do, the important thing is that the little monkey dances. What's to justify? So long as my kid hits a golf ball more accurately than your kid, or can match all the state capitals with the right ZIP codes. It's all good.

"All I want to do, ever, is play chess." -- Bobby Fischer
 
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There are plenty of parallels, things a parent might value, selecting one path over another. Sports, music, religion - plenty of ways to bend the twig.

Really? We just never knew!

This is the television meme that the intellectual is bad at everything else. The only thing you left out was being a social misfit too.

What we are finding is Economies of Scope: When you acquire one talent, it augments the acquisition of another.

We started with physical development because that is what the literature on intellectual development told us to do. So producing a little athlete is what gave us this intellectual. The exercise program and the micro motor skill development in writing so early gave him the dexterity, strength and endurance to bang out half an hour of piano. The intellectual acumen for music theory was already there, so we've been doing it.

But yes, we're not so good at TV. The average American watches five hours a day of it. We don't. So it is very easy to best Americans generally in everything at the same time. Except for TV.
 
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As one poster noted somewhere: We landed on the Moon and this is good enough for me.

btw any idea on how to implement this? How to motivate parents to use this?
 
The question I don't think gets asked enough is, "What is the goal and why?"

For your first example, it seems plain: I want to communicate with my kid as early as possible to lessen frustration - presumably, the kid is still pre-verbal and the signing is an early alternative. But what about your second example where the kid finishes her education years before the herd. What's the point?

The assumption seems to be "it's better." Somehow. As a skeptic, I'd want to know why it's thought to be better. Deep and strange is the Alchemy used to shape an adult from plastic child.

I think that, yes, it makes sense for certain gestures, and possibly even sign language to be used with children when they are in their pre-verbal state. I think the benefits of sign language is that they are an off-the-shelf set of symbols that parents can apply consistently to allow them to be learnt by children more easily than an ad hoc system. For parents to understand what their children want and for their children to be happier and less frustrated then it does indeed seem worthwhile.

I think that the Tomasello pages I uploaded here do have some connection here in the sense that children do have the capacity for learning abstract, arbitrary signs, and that - after all - is an important component of language. Simple gestures that mimic something such as eating, or the ritualizations which come about from the child trying to do something and having the parents pick up on the child's intent are not arbitrary signs whereas sign language usually is (with a few exceptions such as indexical markers and a few others).

So that claim I am happy to accept.

Where I am more dubious is the idea that this has far-reaching developmental benefits in terms of turning children into geniuses.
 
I read that thanks and it isn't quite oriented the way we want, namely the effect of training as opposed to the instinctual kinds of ways infants tend to communicate on their own.

If there are short term benefits, namely facilitating communication between parent and child, it is something to promote regardless of whether it has a long term benefit or not.

Sure, I think it is worth trying.

It is clear to us that you have some people who are doing the baby sign language only to solve a short term problem - they don't want the baby to cry as much or the parent to be frustrated so they do this. They don't do anything else unusual for the rest of the child's education. Whatever benefit there was 16 years ago has dissipated by the end of High School.

But for another parent who is looking for a long-term integrated program of advanced development - this is just the kind of age-appropriate tactic that in combination with others makes for astonishing long term differences. Instead of dropping the ball like the parents above, the parents go right into extending learning, adding phonics, and have their kid graduating grade school before they are kindergarten age.

One huge reason there aren't large scale and long term studies being done is because all of the dollars have been traditionally aimed to at-risk kids. This is changing somewhat now as talented and gifted programs have been added but the overwhelming policy emphasis is on getting the slow kids past some arbitrary standard, not fielding the strongest team. A Teach to the Bottom philosophy.

There aren't any infant-to-preschool programs on how to produce geniuses out of half your population. Because we view this as social injustice: the other half was far enough behind as it was. Now you want to triple the gap? A "How to Make the Rich Even Richer" program.

There are intractable cultural issues with education in America.

Even if the highlighted is true (and I am not sure that is the case), then wouldn't baby sign language also be worth investigating for at-risk children as well?

Also, America is not the only place where children's education is taken seriously as an academic field. Presumably research by Chinese, Japanese, Hong Kong, Singaporean, Korean or Finnish scholars could also be conducted into baby sign language. I just wonder what it says if it exists.
 
It occurs to me where there must be many families that have a bigger incentive to teach their babies sign language, specifically those families with deaf members. Have they noticed any long-term educational benefits in raising children who learnt sign language early?
 
Even if the highlighted is true (and I am not sure that is the case), then wouldn't baby sign language also be worth investigating for at-risk children as well?

Yes, but the age frames we are talking about for the state and federal programs are far too late: pre-school. Baby sign language is for infants as opposed to toddlers/young children.

At the pertinent age, the programs are more concerned with nutrition and general health. They do, by the way, have hearing tests as a part of this, so what they do from the point of identifying a hearing problem is of interest. I don't know.

I'll try again explaining the point that is lost on everyone because of our cultural bias towards "raising up the bottom" instead of "best athlete" approach.

The proponents of Baby Sign language are not motivated by producing child geniuses. If you are, there is a whole set of tactics you need to deploy, and baby sign language would be just one of them. We did not do Baby sign language, but would have used it if we knew about it. We do not believe Baby Sign Language alone can do it. Absolutely not. If you want a genius, you have to work every day for years.

Tuco - Karen Adolph at NYU, who we corresponded with, has some publications on how shocked people from one culture are who see baby-raising strategies employed by other cultures. It is crazy, but well-documented how antagonistic people are to anyone outside of the cultural norm.

We saw Phil Zelazo, of Harvard and then McGill institute who we also corresponded with, take a tremendous amount of heat for early walking - the kids were going to fall down and split their skulls open if they learned to walk. It's true no matter when they walk.

We took a lot of heat too, including calls to Child Protective Services - we had a blog and were posting videos of how advanced our infant was, and it resulted in the accusation that early learning = child abuse. They raided our home, separated us, interrogated us, took videos, and barged in on our pediatrician with the video: just look at what these people are doing! She told them they were idiots, it was the same stuff we were doing in her office and she knew what papers we were following because we showed them to her.

We tried to give the papers to Child Protective Services when they were here, and they refused to even look at them. Lol - Karen's paper on how you can skip crawling, because that's what we did. When they left, they told us our boy was so far ahead that he would need to be evaluated for developmental delay! It was an Alice-in-Wonderland experience, and what we actually did was flee the country. We didn't know they were going directly to our pediatrician and if your pediatrician gives the OK then the state can't touch you.

Both Phil and Karen told us to expect it, and boy we under-estimated their warnings. That's why Karen sent us her papers. We originally contacted her about early locomotor development because of Phil's experiments published in the early 70's and her own research on locomotor development, about it not being linear. The crawling first - walking second myth. Karen said we needed to look at this cultural work she had done, how antagonistic people were going to be raising a child so far from the norm.

We had a decision to make, and it is a discussion subject in our private talanted and gifted homeschool forum: Most of them do what gay people did in the 50's - stay in the closet. A small minority but growing number like us want to come out of the closet and do the Gay Pride march. There's nothing wrong with us and we can be gay just because we feel like it - we don't have to justify ourselves to you like my long-term antagonists demand here.

The tide is turning. Instead of child geniuses being viewed as freaks *ew!* they are getting some great press lately along with congratulatory recognition from the President of the United States. Universities are eagerly admitting ever-younger kids. This is in concert with the surge in homeschool numbers because that's how the parents are doing it. Taking charge themselves.

Baby sign language is just that: the parents teaching the children. Years before the norm. How many of them also integrated early locomotor development? How many of them sang the ABC song every day through the mother's womb? That's what I did, based on research about brain development before birth.

It is the wrong question to ask: long term effect of baby sign language in isolation.

The right question is what if you start education in the womb like we did - music generally but the ABC song specifically - then you do the baby sign language and early locomotor development, teach them to read by age 2, write at 3, etc...

I can tell you what you get: A six year old doing algebra. When he is 100 years old, there's going to be no difference between him and any other 100 year old. But right now is pretty *********** awesome.
 
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Do you live in Norway by any chance? Barnevern? but wow

It was more lighter note. What I meant was that if this technique does work, lets educate about it just like first aid for example.
 
OP, sorry to hear about the troubles you have had, but I am not sure why you are making these broad brush assumptions about everyone else and blaming these perceptions of yours on "the culture". For example, I am not American; I am British and live in Japan so you're wide of the mark in attributing my comments to what you consider to be the deficiencies in American culture.

But I am interested in this topic. What age was your child able to walk? From what I understand, some children do skip the crawling period and start walking straight away.

On the baby sign language thing, it was you who talked about producing geniuses and you who suggested a link with baby sign language so you shouldn't criticize those who ask for evidence. I realize, of course, that you are not saying that baby sign language alone accounts for geniuses but it is still worthwhile producing the research that isolates this as a factor. I thought there was also a lot of research which casts doubt on the influence of parents in nurturing a high IQ to begin with.
 
On the baby sign language thing, it was you who talked about producing geniuses and you who suggested a link with baby sign language so you shouldn't criticize those who ask for evidence. I realize, of course, that you are not saying that baby sign language alone accounts for geniuses but it is still worthwhile producing the research that isolates this as a factor. I thought there was also a lot of research which casts doubt on the influence of parents in nurturing a high IQ to begin with.

It has to do with how genius is defined. IQ is linked to performance compared to others in the same age group. In the early years, a kid who is a few years ahead in certain metrics may test at the genius level. Of course, the difference doesn't necessarily carry through, and in adulthood, the scores would tend to coalesce to the norm.

With the harassment from authorities, it's easier to understand the animosity shown. I only regret that it paints normal criticism/skepticism as an attack.
 
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However, I have scanned a few pages from Michael Tomasello's book Constructing a Language (2003) which is a book about usage-based language acquisition.

I thought about it more and read it a second time. I realize now that my lack of formal linguistics instruction and not knowing sign language made me not appreciate the importance of putting this kind of structure on it.

So thanks, I realize now it is more important. To see it better I need to actually learn mmmf, some linguistics, and baby sign languages to understand it better.
 
ASL is an interesting take on the idea of teaching children multiple languages. As to why you should want to do this, just read up on Chomsky. It's proven to improve learning when a child speaks multiple languages.

I don't think child geniuses are perceived as "eww" I think parents shoving their child's genius in everyone's face to get attention is off putting. Because what exactly is the need to "show off" how brilliant your kid is? It's like the parents that force their kids to sing at parties or play piano for guests. It's about putting the child on display and trying to get some sort of credit for the kid's talent or something.

I had an experience with this kind of thing when a person in our hometown got her kid into Mensa at the age of 3. She was invited onto the Today Show where she promptly told the world she needed to "poop."

What's interesting about watching the video is that the whole time the kid is saying I GOTTA POOP!!! And they are still trying to get through the segment instead of dealing with their child. What could have been a funny loving moment turned creepy fast.

At least the 2 year old was smart enough to yank her mike off and try to get out of there. But the parents just did nothing. The kid wasn't ewww, the parents were. IMO

BTW I don't think this applies to all parents of gifted kids and is certainly NOT directed at you Alaskan Bush Pilot. The conversation just reminded me of this.



http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/11/genius-toddler-today-show_n_1509772.html
 
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ASL is an interesting take on the idea of teaching children multiple languages. As to why you should want to do this, just read up on Chomsky. It's proven to improve learning when a child speaks multiple languages.

Hmmm...I would consider that to be a rather strong claim, and I very much doubt it is associated with Noam Chomsky who I think has little interest in bilingualism and multilingualism.

Here's a summary of an interview that Francois Grosjean (who is much more associated with bilingualism than Chomsky is) had with Noam. It sounds as though Grosjean disagreed with Chomsky on most issues here:

Noam Chomsky started off by saying that he knew very little about bilingualism but as our conversation continued, he clearly showed that he had given it some thought. Four topics marked the interview. The first was that Noam Chomsky was not convinced that there is a sharp difference between monolingualism and bilingualism.

...Finally, I asked Noam Chomsky why linguists, most notably theoretical linguists, had spent so little time studying bilingualism. After all, wasn't half the world's population bi- or multilingual? He did not play down the interest of understanding people who know and use several languages but he thought that theoretical linguists should start with simple cases, that is with monolinguals. For him, the argument is the same as for chemists who study H2O and not other types of water that contain other substances. To understand the latter, you have to start with the former. As he stated, "The only way to deal with the complexities of the real world is by studying pure cases and trying to determine from them the principles that interact in the complex cases." This is taken for granted in the physical sciences, according to him, and it should also be in the non-physical sciences.

So it doesn't sound as though Chomsky has much interest in multilingualism improving learning, or indeed in either of those topics.

I think a more widely regarded authority on the subject is Ellen Bialystok. I have just had a look for any videos of her on the subject and found this one. I am not vouching for it, though, as I haven't seen it myself.

 
Sounds to me like that discussion is based on research techniques, not opinions of multilingualism.


Chomsky hierarchy
Main article: Chomsky hierarchy
Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes/types,[173] or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in programming language,[174] compiler construction, and automata theory).[175]

Minimalist program
Main article: Minimalist program
Since the 1990s, much of Chomsky’s research has focused on what he calls the “minimalist program,” which attempted to demonstrate that the brain’s language faculties are the minimum faculties that could be expected, given certain external conditions that are imposed on us independently. Chomsky began to place less emphasis on something such as a universal grammar embedded in the human brain, and more emphasis on a large number of plastic cerebral circuits. Along with this plasticity would come an infinite number of concepts. The brain would then proceed to associate sounds and concepts, and the rules of grammar that we observe would in fact be only the consequences, or side effects, of the way that language works.[163]

from wiki, as a start point
 
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Sounds to me like that discussion is based on research techniques, not opinions of multilingualism.

No, it has nothing to do with research techniques. The discussion was about opinions on multilingualism. Did you read the article? I am only posting it to show that Chomsky has very little to say about multilingualism in general, let alone the specific claims about multilingualism's effect on learning.


Chomsky hierarchy
Main article: Chomsky hierarchy
Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes/types,[173] or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in programming language,[174] compiler construction, and automata theory).[175]

Minimalist program
Main article: Minimalist program
Since the 1990s, much of Chomsky’s research has focused on what he calls the “minimalist program,” which attempted to demonstrate that the brain’s language faculties are the minimum faculties that could be expected, given certain external conditions that are imposed on us independently. Chomsky began to place less emphasis on something such as a universal grammar embedded in the human brain, and more emphasis on a large number of plastic cerebral circuits. Along with this plasticity would come an infinite number of concepts. The brain would then proceed to associate sounds and concepts, and the rules of grammar that we observe would in fact be only the consequences, or side effects, of the way that language works.[163]

from wiki, as a start point

This is just random cutting-and-pasting. What has the Chomsky hierarchy or the minimalist program got to do with "teaching children multiple languages" and its relationship with improving learning?
 
One advantage to using a small amount of ASL derived signs in the family, it allows one to "speak" with your mouth full.

"Napkin, please"
"Thanks. Do you want milk?"

My personal observation of raising my kids and watching their age cohort grow up around them is that there isn't any one magic bullet to make smart children, but the kinds of parents who employ babysign are the kinds of parents who use many different strategies over the years to preload their childrens' brains with as much information as possible.

And as I said upthread, the specific mechanic of ASL gets in the way of some (certainly not all) children learning verbal language and will be abandoned by the child in favor of learning to operate the noise tool everyone around them is using.

In our case, the three kids were exposed to a decreasing amount of babysign as would be expected for second and third kids. In our case all 3 children hit basic mental milestones at age appropriate times, with no significant variance data. RocketBoy1.0, almost 16 now, doesn't read much but shows average/high intelligence between spasms of ADHD; RocketGirl, nearing 11, was exposed to the least babysign but the most conversation words and tests for reading around college freshman level.
 
It's funny because I think a lot of us are asking what's the point of "preloading" your kids and making baby geniuses here? The only thing we can see is that it gives you something to talk about and a way to feel chuffed for a few years.

There's really no long term evidence that parents that try to make baby brainiacs in any way shape or form are performing better than their mash potato brained idiots drooling in their jello counterparts.

So it doesn't really come across as being this awesome parent. It comes across as using your kid as a little experiment to make you feel better about yourself. Ya gotta wonder why parents are so worried about how their kids compare to their "cohorts." It's like a sense of mockery of the kids peers. Kinda weird to see adults getting off about the way their kid is better than the other 5 year olds. It's creepy.

The only reason I mentioned Chomsky is the idea that student who are multilingual or bilingual have the potential to learn in a more sophisticated way than students who only speak one language. It just never occurred to me that ASL would be another option. But it makes perfect sense.

So cool idea guys.
 
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I just finished my first signing tutorial. Amazing stuff.

Several things stand out as a total noob: first, the gestures are common sense: they mimic the action you take if it is a verb for example. So wide a range of things you can communicate including emotions, and the same thing there: you make the angry face or happy face or whatever it is. Duh. It is way easier than I thought because of this.

Some of the actions will not make sense to a baby, for example doing a squeezing action with your hands for "juice". A parent can bring an orange in front of the baby and squeeze it before serving the juice so that the baby really nails what it means.

The second insight is that you are saying the word as you sign it. So there's a clear link between spoken language and signing that is going to be mutually reinforcing. You can combine words into sentences, so this is pretty thrilling stuff in terms of language development.

The third thing is the development of finer motor skills. Signing is literally eye-hand coordination. So here again I find the same thing over and over again: inculcating this interferes in nothing. Instead, it is simultaneous development of several skills.

The most common thing I see parents saying is that it reduces stress.

My college room-mate's Dad was deaf, so they signed. I didn't pay any attention to it, figuring it was at about the difficulty level of learning a foreign language. That isn't true at all, and had I known I would have looked into this back then.

Our youngest just turned five so we gave him his reading test. We were stunned. He scored higher than his older brother (age to age) and a couple of years higher than I expected. Unbelievable, but 7th grade. We never had any goal in mind, we just love school as an every day family activity, knowing too the importance of education.
 
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OP, sorry to hear about the troubles you have had, but I am not sure why you are making these broad brush assumptions about everyone else and blaming these perceptions of yours on "the culture".


Hardly. Let's start with Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, the Pulitzer Prize winning book in 1963. There have been innumerable works since then, largely talking about how much worse its gotten.

But I think the tide is turning, and you aren't reading if you didn't see what I made note of: eagerness of colleges now to accept ever younger people. The scholarships, the robot competitions and all manner of other manifestations, like big positive press articles and recognition by the highest elected official in the land.

It isn't Asia, lol. Not by a long shot. In terms of educational priority in the culture. But the future looks very good. For parents who think like we do.

Our oldest, six years old, was very disturbed that his younger brother scored higher at his five year old reading test. So he took it today and completed high school, grade 12.8 level. Missed two words out of 16 12th grade terms: Exophthalmic and Omniscient.

This term "pre-loading" is beautiful manipulative hooey. We call it teaching, and in the peer reviewed literature it is called early infant learning. This OP is an example of early infant learning, not "pre-loading". Being against teaching - against learning is just inconceivable to us.

The result of enough early infant learning is a six year old who can read better than a high school graduate from a good portion of the country. Empowering people to read at any age is an immediate direct benefit.

To say that you should not take that immediate direct benefit is absurd. I have a graph I will put up after I put in this new data on the kids' most recent test scores to emphasize something like baby sign language - real early in infancy - is going to be part of a good comprehensive program on early learning.
 
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My personal observation of raising my kids and watching their age cohort grow up around them is that there isn't any one magic bullet to make smart children, but the kinds of parents who employ babysign are the kinds of parents who use many different strategies over the years to preload their childrens' brains with as much information as possible.

I've been relentless about that point and let me put up a graph that I modified after I saw it here:

quality.cr.k12.ia.us/DeployTeams/06-07/Reading_May07_rauscher.ppt


That's a power point presentation with an annotated graph from work she cites by Hirsch in 1996 following what happened to pre-school kids entering with high verbal vs. low verbal ability, and then tracking them forward through teenage years.

The high-verbal kids are months ahead of the low verbal kids at age 4. That gap widens to over 5 years by the time they are teenagers. So what we did with the graph was add our two kids to it. We started testing reading level earlier at age 3, although we were doing the alphabet since before birth.

reading%20level%20by%20age%202016%20no%20names_zpsypqxqjst.jpg


"Six" means our six year old and "Five" is our five year old. Neither is compulsory school age yet, lol.

So our oldest for example was testing like a second-grader when he was 3, four years ahead of his peers already and the younger son was close behind him. By age four, they were about five years ahead of their peers. By age five, they were both reading like 12 year olds - seven years ahead of their age peers. The oldest is now ten years ahead.

We read this presentation, some of the works cited, and other stuff a while back and it became our rallying cry from 2014 until now: "Widen the Gap". lol. The reason we did this was hearing things like "they can learn it later anyway", the same negative spirit in questioning the "long term" benefits of sustained early learning effort. The research told us we could do this, and it worked.

This graph obscures what went on deep into infancy: training them much earlier like the videos in the OP. The first video is a 17 month old. The second is a 7 month old. I have a two-month old on video walking upright, holding onto our hands. Had he been signing too, we would be even further ahead than we are now. Not a lot. But something worth doing.

Collecting all of these early learning insights into one repository is something that interests me and I think baby sign language is worth studying more. How to integrate it with what we already learned requires more training, and I'll do it. It is super attractive to our philosophy because it is so early in infancy.

Start Early, and Widen the Gap.
 
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Hardly. Let's start with Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, the Pulitzer Prize winning book in 1963. There have been innumerable works since then, largely talking about how much worse its gotten.

That book is over fifty years old. What do the innumerable works on this subject give as their evidence?

But I think the tide is turning, and you aren't reading if you didn't see what I made note of: eagerness of colleges now to accept ever younger people.

Why are you accusing me of not reading? It seems strangely hostile.

The scholarships, the robot competitions and all manner of other manifestations, like big positive press articles and recognition by the highest elected official in the land.

I hope this future will still leave room for verbs. ;)

It isn't Asia, lol. Not by a long shot. In terms of educational priority in the culture. But the future looks very good. For parents who think like we do.

Our oldest, six years old, was very disturbed that his younger brother scored higher at his five year old reading test. So he took it today and completed high school, grade 12.8 level. Missed two words out of 16 12th grade terms: Exophthalmic and Omniscient.

Which is fine, but does he know the meaning of exophthalmic?

This term "pre-loading" is beautiful manipulative hooey. We call it teaching, and in the peer reviewed literature it is called early infant learning. This OP is an example of early infant learning, not "pre-loading". Being against teaching - against learning is just inconceivable to us.

I didn't use the term "pre-loading" so don't take that up with me. I'm also not against teaching or against learning, so please don't insinuate I am.

The result of enough early infant learning is a six year old who can read better than a high school graduate from a good portion of the country. Empowering people to read at any age is an immediate direct benefit.

To say that you should not take that immediate direct benefit is absurd. I have a graph I will put up after I put in this new data on the kids' most recent test scores to emphasize something like baby sign language - real early in infancy - is going to be part of a good comprehensive program on early learning.

Sure, but I think there are still going to be maturational constraints on an infant's ability to sign, speak and read.
 
Again what is the point of getting a 6 year old to read on a higher level and basically shaming his older brother for having his younger brother do better than him?

I'm all for educating kids and pushing them to do better. And strong reading comprehension and literacy skills at a young age help develop a life long learner.

But what is the goal in doing all this in such a "competitive" way? Being proud of your kids for excelling is one thing. But being proud that they did better than others is curious to me. Why would this enter into the equation? Why not just be thrilled at your own child's talents?
 
Which is fine, but does he know the meaning of exophthalmic?

I was surprised he missed exophthalmic because he had it in science already. He started chemistry at age 4. I have a video of him discussing chemistry and the Periodic Table of Elements at four years old.

There are two kinds of reading tests they do. The first is just their "de-coding" ability. That is what you see being graphed. Any child can sound out words that are significantly above their reading comprehension. To test reading comprehension, we take reading comprehension tests. Good Lord we have done dozens of them.

That varies by subject. In chemistry and cosmology, the six year old is at a high school level and in language arts he is the worst, because that is my worst subject. In math, he's doing really basic algebra. Not sure how to place that because he can lecture on the pythagorean theorem and do a very limited number of operations. Beginning algebra.

Angrysoba - Forgive that some of my comments are in that post but not directed towards you, and pre-loading is one of them. There already is a term science uses, and it is Early Infant Learning. A skeptic site needs to use the terms of science.

The term "loading" demonstrates the fiction that kids are just empty vessels that the school system fills up. When you add "pre" to it, there is so much wrong with it, lol. "Pre" to what? To a public school that has a 100% non-attainment rate in grade level competency?

Let's take the home city of an antagonist here: New York City. To make the top public city-wide talented and gifted grade schools, you have to test at the 99th percentile at age 4. NYC does the NNAT and OSLAT tests.

NYC school system literature says you are "eligible" at 97% percentile, but the slots are limited so the consultants we talked to said you better come in at 99%. I was actually born and have family there so we looked into it closely.

http://schools.nyc.gov/ChoicesEnrollment/GiftedandTalented/default.htm

The top talented and gifted private schools are like $40K a year so testing into a public school city-wide T&G program is worth tens of thousands of dollars a year.

Forty thousand dollars a year to Speyer Legacy in NYC for example. That is the kind of value parents place on education. Well so do we. But we don't have forty thousand dollars a year. Instead, we have our own time and efforts in a little log cabin in the woods.

We prepared specifically for the NYC tests because there is an outside chance of moving there. You can't just show up at kindergarten with no preparation. Neither of our kids would have been eligible.

NYC parents, to get their kids into these programs, pay a lot of money to tutors; buy preparatory exam packages - it's where I learned about progressive matricies tests and I posted a thread about it.

Your kid, to get into a program like this can't be one or two years ahead of grade level. You have to come in order of magnitude more than that. Such a mission cannot be accomplished starting at age 4 when the test is given. Or even age 3. The best strategy is one that looks at getting ahead from before they even come out of the womb. Start with the ABC song already deeply rooted in memory.

Baby sign language is just that kind of tool. Start communication skills, then build on them instead of dropping them.
 
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