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Look for the Signs: Infants Get Ahead with Baby Sign Language

Brooklyn parents now teach sign language to their pre-verbal infants

Following the birth of her son Sam in 2001, Park Slope resident Andrea Fixell often wondered what her child was thinking. Was he hungry? Tired? Did he want to play with one of his toys? If Sam could answer these simple questions, Fixell thought, it would make life much easier for him and for his parents.

Unfortunately, Sam was still many months away from being able to speak. Instead, he expressed his needs like any other baby—by crying or throwing a tantrum.

So in order to speed up communicating with her son, Fixell turned to sign language. A trained teacher of the deaf, she decided to teach Sam simple signs for words such as “milk,” “more,” and “sleepy”.  The strategy worked. Well before he could speak verbally, Sam was using those signs and others on a regular basis. His crying became less frequent, as did his parents’ bouts of frustration.

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“I realized that by signing with him I could actually communicate with him earlier, and it sort of opened his whole world,” Fixell said.

Today, 10 years later, Fixell is the founding director of Sign-a-Song, a company that offers baby sign language classes in Park Slope and other spots around Brooklyn. The technique that she teaches—known as “baby sign”—takes advantage of the fact that infants are able to make meaningful gestures long before their vocal skills develop.

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In fact, some babies start signing when they are just six months old.

In addition to enhancing communication, Fixell believes that baby signing also promotes bonding between parent and child.

“It alleviates a lot of frustration because the child is able to express what they want and the parent can understand them. Everybody is happy because their needs are being met,” Fixell said.

According to Sarah Pimentel, a Prospect Heights mom who began signing with her daughter last year, signing also gives parents an unprecedented chance to learn what is going on inside their child’s mind.

“Kids understand so much more than they are able to say,” she said. “It just takes time for the syllables to develop and differentiate. But they start trying to communicate really early, it’s just you can’t always tell what they are trying to say. With the sign language it’s clear.”

Despite the growing popularity of baby sign, some parents have reservations. The most frequent concern is that it will stunt the child’s vocal development by dampening his or her desire to communicate verbally. But Fixell thinks that the opposite is true.

“People are very concerned about is whether it is going to halt speech,” she says. “It actually promotes speech because it makes them excited about communicating.”

Psychologists and pediatricians are just beginning to think about such questions in a scientific manner. Although there have only been a handful of studies on baby sign, the preliminary results are promising. A recent study funded by the National Institutes of Health found that 24 month olds who had been exposed to sign language scored higher than average on a wide variety of cognitive measurements.

The American Society of Pediatrics has also endorsed the practice of baby sign. The organization’s material for new parents confirms that "infant sign language really does deliver on its promise of improved communication."

Fixell’s company, Sign-a-Song, offers six and eight week classes in Park Slope, Cobble Hill, and Brooklyn Heights. In Park Slope, classes are held at on Union Street and the on St. John’s Place.

As the name indicates, Sign-a-Song teaches signing with the aid of music, embedding the lessons in catchy, memorable tunes.

During a recent class at Spoke the Hub, one instructor played the guitar and sang, while another signed along with the lyrics of the songs. Each piece focused on different themes such as numbers, letters, or how to say “please” and “thank you”.  Arrayed in a circle around the instructors, parents and their infants followed along with their hands and voices.

After the class, Fixell said that she first began teaching baby sign without musical accompaniment, but she found it difficult to keep the babies’ attention.

“The parents were learning something, but it wasn’t as exciting and fun,” she said. “That’s one reason why we use music. The other thing is that … songs are naturally repetitive. And so the signs are used over and over again.”

In addition to using music, Sign-a-Song also differentiates itself from other signing classes by teaching the babies American Sign Language (ASL). Whereas some baby signing classes use a simplified, gesture-oriented form of signing, Fixell uses ASL, which is the most commonly used language among deaf Americans.

“I’d rather teach them an actual language that they can use beyond babyhood,” she explained. “These are not just made up gestures, this is an actual language with its own linguistics and its own semantics.”

By the end of the Sign-a-Song course, some of the older infants have learned not only how to sign individual words, but also how to group different signs into phrases and even sentences.

For Fern Ring, another Brooklyn parent who uses sign language with her child, baby sign is much more than just communication and bonding.

“Children at this age are alive, like a whole being, so [signing with them is] really honoring where they’re at,” she said. “If you honor where they are and take joy in where they are, they just become more of what they are. It’s just like the song ‘The More We are Together the Happier We’ll Be’. That’s kind of like the whole theory.”

The next session of Sign-a-Song classes will start in the fall. Visit the company’s website for more information.

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