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Baby Sign Language

I was the one who naively used the term preloading. If it offends you this greatly I retract it. I'm not an educator but a random dad who used babysign, thus I'm annoyed by your passive aggressively belligerent statement "a skeptic site needs to use the terms of science."

Meanwhile, I will encourage you to Have A Nice Day. Don't bother replying. I'll not return to this thread as it seems overfilled with showoffy egotism, weird defensiveness and complete horsepoop.

{edit to add}
I accept Personal Messages, if any of you actually feel the need to prove wildly improbable claims.
 
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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.

Did you mean exothermic?
 
Did you mean exothermic?

That's hilarious. So no, he didn't have exophthalmic. I didn't know what it meant until I just looked it up. Thank you very much for doing that in a polite way instead of taking a dig.

Finished a second tutorial on Baby Sign Language. I didn't know there were so many different sign languages. Even across English-speaking countries there are differences. I am seeing wide variations in the age parents are starting, from infancy to six months old.

We're very accustomed to people more or less baiting us, demanding we show that something works - and then say we're bragging when we put out the data from our own work. The subject is early infant learning. More particularly how baby sign language can fit in with a sustained program of early infant learning.
 
I was the one who naively used the term preloading. If it offends you this greatly I retract it. I'm not an educator but a random dad who used babysign, thus I'm annoyed by your passive aggressively belligerent statement "a skeptic site needs to use the terms of science."

Meanwhile, I will encourage you to Have A Nice Day. Don't bother replying. I'll not return to this thread as it seems overfilled with showoffy egotism, weird defensiveness and complete horsepoop.

{edit to add}
I accept Personal Messages, if any of you actually feel the need to prove wildly improbable claims.

No problem. I'm sending the video of him doing his chemistry at age 4. For his grandma. I don't know how you are going to ignore me from now on and refuse to accept the evidence I very happily submit.

This is what I mean by on the one hand demanding "prove it" but on the other hand the proof is showing off, and you are stomping off too indignant to look at proof even if I submit it? Anyone else can submit proof, just not me? lol.
 
It's not that. It's just you have yet to explain why it's important for your child to know these things? Especially when it seems like you are developing a competition in your kids that teaches them that there is something wrong with not being able to perform well on tests.

What is your goal in doing this? Can you not see how it seems a bit borish and ego driven when parents train their kids to read at ridiculously high levels . Is there a reason you feel your kindergarten age child needs to know the definition and spelling of a medical word used to describe bulging eyes?

It's hard to grasp the point in all this and it comes across as a confusing message. Is this about encouraging your child and educating them? Or is this about proving something to the nay sayers and using your child as the guinea pig to do so?
 
We're very accustomed to people more or less baiting us, demanding we show that something works - and then say we're bragging when we put out the data from our own work. The subject is early infant learning. More particularly how baby sign language can fit in with a sustained program of early infant learning.

As much as I want to air a different side of the early education issue, I think you are doing a fine job as a parent. Half the battle is just giving kids the time and attention they deserve.
 
Just to echo what marplots said, I think I should also offer my support. I'm certainly not against early infant learning and I am not trying to rain on your parade.

I'd just like to offer a few more pages of that book by Tomasello. This leads on from the previous pages I scanned. It's more than ten years old, so some of the research could be out of date by now, and it does follow a particular theory of language acquisition that not all linguists agree with (in particular, Tomasello's book is meant as an argument against Chomsky and Pinker).

However, in this chapter on early holophrases and early linguistic ability, he points out that we should not necessarily think of language as being built from phonemes, to words, to sentences, to paragraphs. Instead, children pick up on salient words and phrases. Some of the infant's learning will be combinatorial, but other learning will involve segmentation. For example, children will learn whole frozen phrases such as "I-wanna-do-it" or "You're-welcome" without realizing that they are made up of words. This process is segmentation.

For example, in English there are a lot of phrasal verbs. Children often first learn prepositions in a phrasal verb ("off" instead of "take off"). In Chinese, on the other hand, which has fewer (no?) phrasal verbs, the word "remove" will be more quickly learnt. Chinese has less (no?) morphology also, so infants will not have to go through stages of learning the morphology for past tense or plurals as English-speaking children do.

But also, he points out that children need "intention-reading" skills such as:

joint attentional frames
an ability to understand communicative intentions
role reversal imitation

And he says, "Language emerges in children in the months following the first birthday - and not before - because this is when these fundamental skills of intention-reading are solidly in place." [p.41]

So it may not be possible to teach actual sign language to babies prior to their ability to focus on people, understand that other people have some form of agency, desire to imitate etc...

I would think that if there are counter-examples to this then people in the deaf community would have discovered an early ability for actual linguistic ability.
 

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Just out of interest, how similar to actual sign language is baby sign? My guess is that it is really a form of standardized gestures whereas ASL and BSL are grammatically complex languages that prioritize ease of use rather than making the symbols "look like" the things the signs stand for. In that sense most sign languages use arbitrary signs in the same way spoken languages and phonemic written languages do.
 
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.


Do you know of any studies which document the effect of auditory stimulation in utero on post-natal learning? I would like to read them.

Also, I would be interested in reading the studies on the effect of early locomotor experience on future learning and cognition.

I thought you were just learning sign language now? Did you use it with your 6 year old when he was an infant?
 
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