Talk:Baby sign language

Resource Center for Babies and Sign Language

MyBabyCanTalk.com is the premier resource center on the Internet for babies and sign language featuring detailed tutorials, background research, and a video dictionary with more than 200 ASL signs. All of the resources on this web site are free of charge.

How to Begin Signing with Your Baby

Baby Signing Research

Baby's Video Dictionary of Signs

This company was founded on the principle that babies can communicate at a very early age using sign language and dedicated to giving babies and parents an effective way to communicate at an early age, reducing frustration for both and creating a special bond that is so important for healthy child development.

errors

The statement "topic/comment [is] the grammar of spoken languages which lack a written form" is completely false. Lots of languages with clear grammatical subjects are unwritten, and conversely written languages such as Chinese have been claimed to be topic-comment. The adaptation of writing to a language does not radically restructure its grammatical system!

Also, "Look! Squirrel!" is not a topic-comment construction (unless you consider the pointing to be the topic, in which case "[point] Squirrel!" is a better example), and "There is a squirrel roughly to the north-east of us, approximately 20 feet away." does not have a grammatical subject or object, so it does not at all illustrate a subject-verb-object construction. --kwami 08:55, 11 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Non-pay external links?

Most all of the sites I seem to find on the Internet are pay-sites. This makes me a little dubious. Does anyone have any good free sites? Thanks! Ewlyahoocom 18:49, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

I don't think there's a whole lot to it. The books I've seen are mostly testimonials to convince you to try it. There's maybe half a chapter of useful info such as at what age you might see results, the importance of repetition and reinforcement (you know, general pedagogy), reduction in temper tantrums, greater eloquence once speech is learned, and children passing sign on to their younger sibs after they've ceased to use it with their parents. Then there's the debate over ASL vs. true baby sign; for the former, you can get a regular ASL dictionary; in the case of the latter, the book will give suggestions for useful words and ways to sign them, but in the end will tell you that the best signs are the ones you and your child come up with together. So other than a feel-good exercise, 90% of the text is useless once you've decided to go this route. I doubt the pay sites offer anything more than the books. kwami 19:56, 25 September 2005 (UTC)

I just reversed an addition of a pay site (http://www.babysign.co.uk/) as spam. Should I not have done it? --Phelan 06:29, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

Another pay site was added([1]). This time I just moved it down and marked it as a commercial site. Phelan 13:21, 11 August 2006 (UTC)

Cons

I'm most interested in the cons. There seems to be lots of sites saying how wonderful it is, but what research contradicts or supports the claims.

• I actually haven't heard of any yet. I've got a friend who's been studying ASL/interpreting for many years now and has studied baby signs from a professional point of view, and she only had positive things to say about it as well. The biggest "con" claim seems to be that it will discourage kids from learning to talk, and that's been refuted by most professionals that've actually studied the situation. I'm looking forward to trying this once my baby's born. --Maelwys 20:07, 11 May 2006 (UTC)