This depends on how much exposure to authentic language the child has. There is no consistent consequences to the impact that children acquire over time.

Baby sign language is misleading. It is a sign vocabulary dominated by spoken language grammar. One can speak a whole sentence but use only 2–3 signs, relevant to the child's knowledge. Language requires full grammatical structure and that is where baby sign language is misleading.

There is no such thing as baby sign language. Baby signs would be a more accurate description per the previous paragraph.

Going to authentic language exposure such as hearing children of ASL users, it varies from child to child. I am deaf and bilingual along with my husband, we exposed our children to both languages on a daily basis and both reached milestones in both languages.

One story I can share is where friends of ours who are hearing and sign language interpreters taught both languages from birth. Their first 2 children had all deaf babysitters. The oldest did not speak until she was 2 or 3 years old, yet she had ASL as her language. Doctors told her mother that she was wrong to do that. Around the age I mentioned, the doctor was surprised when she started speaking English with no issues.

Common research (easily found, again misleading on the concept of language) demonstrates that signs support speaking skills, babies can visualize signs with the item. Again, it is spoken language dominant with a sign vocabulary to reduce frustration and improve flow of communication. It is not an authentic language.

No and Yes. Children who are very effective at using signs and body language to convey their needs are often slower at speaking because they don't need to try harder to get their needs through. It doesn't mean that it delays their development. The first sign of learning to speak is using sound and body to communicate, they are on track. They have the language in them, they just don't use it until they feel comfortable with speaking it. Most children, including bilingual children, should be speaking short sentences in at least 1 language or mix of both by 2.5 years old. Beyond this age is when you need to start being worried and see a paeditrician to access for what cause the speech delay. Usually the reasons have nothing to do with being bilingual (I count sign language as one language) but more about overall development delay or hearing lost. In those cases, sign language actually help them to communicate while they get help from speech therapist.

There was a documentary about a pair of twin born to deaf parents but they, themselves, are not deaf. The parents signed to them from day 1 so by 6 months they can communicate using sign language. The twin went to daycare and from there, they start developing speech language and developing like normal children because obviously daycare teachers can't read sign language so they have to learn speech language to communicate with them.

Does teaching a hearing infant “baby signs” interfere with the child’s ability to master spoken language?

Only if you define “interfere with” to mean “improve.”

When it comes to babies, there is no such thing as too much language exposure. The more language you throw at a kid, the better off the kid is likely to be. It doesn’t matter whether the language in question is English, French, American Sign Language (ASL), or Xhosa. Babies are language-learning machines.

Regardless of whether the child is being exposed to English, French, ASL, or Xhosa, babies go through the same stages of language learning. They start babbling at about 4–6 months. Lexical items appear at about 10 months.

When discussing the language development of very young children, it’s common for child development professionals to count the number of words in the child’s productive vocabulary as a rough indicator of whether the child is meeting certain developmental milestones. For instance, most 24-month-old children have productive vocabularies of about 100 words.

The productive vocabulary of a 24-month-old child who is being raised in a bilingual environment gets divided between two languages. Instead of having a 100-word vocabulary in English, the child might be able to produce 50 words in English and 50 words in Xhosa. If you count only the 50 words in the “English” half of the child’s vocabulary, the child appears to be experiencing a language delay. The child has only half as much productive English vocabulary as its monolingual peers.

But the problem isn’t with the child’s overall language development; the problem is that you counted only half of the child’s productive vocabulary. This apparent language delay disappears in a matter of months, and the bilingual child winds up with superior English-language skills by the time the kid hits kindergarten.

It works exactly the same way if the two languages are English and ASL. If you measure the productive vocabulary of a 24-month-old child who is being raised in an bilingual ASL/English environment, you can expect to find an apparent language delay for a few months, after which the bilingual child will catch up with and then surpass its monolingual peer. It doesn’t matter what the two languages are.

I will leave you with one final question. When you’re raising a child, what is your goal? Is your goal to produce a 24-month-old child with the biggest productive English-language vocabulary on the block? Or is your goal to produce a successful adult in the long run? Viewed from a long-term perspective, bilingual is better.

This topic has been written exhaustively in the last 20 years that I am astounded to find this question even posted. As some mentioned, which group of infants are you asking about? The hearing infants, the deaf infants or both?

The best example of how sign language does not interfere with vocal language skills are children with deaf parents. About 90% of deaf children are born to hearing parents, and the vast majority of children born to Deaf parents are hearing. Deaf parents are often flexible in how children learn language and from birth most will sign with their kids and often they will not have speech issues once they pick it up through various sources. Most deaf people do have speech fluency issues, which children can pick up on and sometimes have speech therapy to correct them; nonetheless, they have two languages from birth - sign language and spoken language. Their social and academic performance is average as any other children with one exception the flexibility of learning and thinking in two languages.

Hearing infants learning sign is just a way to reduce frustration and communication barriers (according to parents) because they can sign words - mind you, not a language - to clearly share what they want. If there is one absolute that I would share in terms of infant sign language that it is not a language. Parents learn specific vocabulary and then abandon them once the child starts speaking. Only a few will go beyond and actually learn and use the language amongst sign language users.

For deaf infants learning sign language preventing them from learning spoken language, really? Can we go back to the second paragraph about children with deaf parents? Depending on how well parents are aware of bilingualism, they will and can use both languages. It is better to give a strong foundational language before giving a second inaccessible language (even with technology), which will build bilingualism at a young age - prior to going into school.

I am a bilingual deaf person sandwiched between hearing people (parents and children). Both languages have been and always been important to me and never will prevent me or any other bilingual users from being stupid just because one language is better than two or three.

My son was born in Iran, and I spoke to him in English (I am American) and everyone else - except his sister - spoke to him in Farsi (his sister spoke to him in both languages). Also, his father and his father’s family did not speak Farsi as their native language. Instead, it was Azerbaijani (I am told). They, themselves, called it “Turkai” -and I am spelling it the way they said it.

So, my son was exposed to three languages - and he took on English and Farsi quickly, but not so much the other language, but could understand it well.

My friends in Iran, who were all wives of Iranians but from countries the world over, advised me right away to never start speaking to my son in Farsi even it began to seem easier to do so. I was confident I never would, and seriously doubted it would be “easier” to do so. Why would that even be a thing?

As my son got older, however, he began preferring Farsi over English. I noticed I was having a harder time getting my message across, and he often resisted. I’d say something to him in English, he would reply in Farsi. Ah - so THIS was what my friends referred to! So, I stuck with English.

But, it wasn’t long before I began slipping in a Farsi word here and there just because I “didn’t have time for this”. I was working full-time and married to a man who didn’t think a woman should be given any help with the kids, house, cooking, cleaning, etc regardless. His family felt the same. No matter what I did - they were never happy and constantly degraded me as a mother, housewife, and cook. So, I was also under a lot of stress and I was in Iran because my ex abducted our daughter there when she was five, giving me no choice but to go there myself.

Having said all that in an attempt to redeem myself - I do have many regrets. Finally abandoning English and communicating only in Farsi to my son is one of them. When he was eight, I was able to slip away from my ex with both my children. My ex had unexpectedly decided we would visit the US, and when we landed in Detroit, I was able to get a customs official to help. She enlisted the help of her superior, who separated me and my children from my ex when I informed her his green card was long expired. My children and I were allowed to board the next scheduled flight - but my ex would not cooperate in giving us any of our luggage - so we went on with the clothes on our back and the tickets to the next flight.

It was here that my son was handicapped by not being able to say more than “hello” or “goodbye” in English. But, he picked up English rapidly and was able to converse well enough in a month. Even so, it managed to become a wall that some of my family could not get past. THAT is on THEM, not my son. It served as an excuse to keep him at arm’s length and was seen as overwhelming evidence of his “foreignness” and a member of “the other” they could not deal with.

And so - my regret.

I apologize for this going beyond the scope of the question - but my advice to anyone who is in a dual-linguistic marriage is to please continue speaking their native tongue to their child. Even thru that hump that managed to defeat me.

Babies are extremely gifted little persons. They are capable of using anything to communicate, including posture, facial expressions and gestures. Uttering streams of well formed phonemes is hard for infants since their vocal tracts are not fully grown. And getting their tongues to move in sync with the rest requires a lot of training. Hence babbling.

On the other hand, babies are generally able to point very early. They can also quite readily use simplified sign language units. For example my eldest daughter learned the LSF sign for 'more' around 5 or 6 months, before being able to say 'encore'. And even then it came as 'atawi' (encore + oui, just to be on the safe side). Interestingly, this gesture was at first for 'more honey' only. And then she realized she could get more anything… but she had to be more specific. And since anything was 'patato', it was more efficient to point at what she wanted or use the sign for something that was not present (chocolate).

So based on my experience as well as scientific publication, I would say babies are totally capable of using gesture codes, if not proper signs, as early as 6 or 7 months, while most infants are not capable of uttering recognizable 'words' before that period. So it's not so much that babies use SL before oral languages. They can use anything to communication, including gestures. Either instead of oral languages or in conjunction with oral sequences.

This generally is a nice bonding experience and allows your child to express what she wants more clearly and thus lessens frustration and the ensuing tantrums. And don't worry, signs DO NOT get in the way of learning English. Ever. Trust me, I'm a linguist.

This old canard again? This bullshit has been around since at least the 1880s, promulgated by anti-Signed language forces, especially the Alexander Graham Bell Association and its proxies, in order to gain public acceptance of their efforts to universally prohibit the speaking of and instruction in signed languages around the world.

This horse puckey was plucked out of thin air with no scientific basis to it, and scientific evidence has consistently shown this notion to be the total lie that it is. And yet, AGBAD continues to spew this putrid excrement out of their forked tongue mouths, and the masses continue to swallow this sewage, as evidenced by the masses on Quora who continue to ask variations of this very question I am answering here.

The evidence:

1. People who become Deaf after having learned speech don’t necessarily lose their speech skills.
2. Hearing children of Deaf parents learn how to speak orally just fine.
3. Deaf children of Deaf parents (who sign) tend to have better oral speech (and English) skills than Deaf of Hearing (who don’t sign).
4. Hearing people are flocking to the current fad of teaching signs to their freaking HEARING babies on the premise that this will promote language development and parent-child bonding, yadda yadda and these children grow up into Hearing, orally-speaking adults who probably remember none of the signs they might have learned as babies.

So NO, learning a Signed language does NOT damage a child’s (Hearing or Deaf) oral language development.

It actually helps. It’s considered a bridge to verbal communication. Speech is a complex motor function that takes a long time to occur. Children understand a lot of what is said to them (receptive language) before they start using language (expressive language). Many signs that you would use with a baby or toddler such as “ more” or “eat” are easier to execute with the hands than with speech. For a hearing child, you would pair the word and sign together. Children with normal hearing will use verbal language unless there is a severe verbal communication disorder. Sign language will not become a typically developing hearing child’s native language.

It helps.

In fact, infants should be taught:

• How to sign, and
• How to talk

just weeks after their birth.

This allows the parents time to get better at teaching, and allows for instruction to be productive as soon as the child is ready.

Children will remember many visual and auditory clues or experiences long before they can repeat them back. Much like adults learning a foreign language can understand the teacher before they can communicate as well as the teacher.

Technically, the learning-acquisition hypothesis states that learning is continual so anything we try to add to the environment can be helpful.

Well, anything good that we want to have access to later, can be added earlier.

That’s one of the many reasons I show parents how to teach their children how to talk.

The children will usually pick it up anyway, but why oh why would anyone abdicate the teaching role to the least qualified person?

Which is why the

Parents should get involved at the earliest possible opportunity and start teaching the basics of sign language and spoken language.

-John Casey

I have answered this question before. Here is what I previously wrote:

“First of all let me define the difference between using “sign language” and using a few signs.

Sign language is a complex system of hand movements to convey both word meaning and grammatical structure. Sign language is vital for language-learning for toddlers who have a certain level of hearing impairment/deafness.

What most people mean by “using sign language with a toddler” is not to use the complex system of sign language that people with significant hearing impairments use. Instead it mostly means to incorporate a few basic signs into the daily exchanges between parent and child in order to facilitate communication. The signs used are usually the signs for “more,” “want.” “stop,” “please,” “thank you,” “eat,” “drink,” “potty.” They may also include words to indicate the names of family members, pets or favorite toys, foods, or drinks.

Using a few basic signs with your toddler to facilitate spoken language can be fun as long as you ALWAYS accompany the sign with spoken words for that sign. For example: You sign the word “more” while you say, “More. You want more?” And when your child signs back the word “more,” you continue to use spoken words and confirm, “Oh, you want MORE juice!” After all, your ultimate goal for your hearing child is to use spoken language. In order for him/her to learn spoken language, he/she must hear spoken language.

Using a few simple signs to interact with your toddler is not a critical element to developing good language skills. If you do not use signs with your typically-developing baby, your baby will still learn language just fine.

What IS critical to learning good language skills is TALKING TO YOUR CHILD. You need to talk to your child about what he/she is experiencing as he/she is experiencing it. The more chances he/she gets to connect words to what is being experienced the more language he/she will learn.”

I want to add that I have used signing both as a parent and professionally. I used simple signs to facilitate communication with my youngest child who has Down Syndrome. I also regularly use simple signing to facilitate oral communication in children with developmental disabilities. I always use spoken words when I use signs in therapy.

Deaf children, or hearing children? in both cases, probably yes, but so what?

With a signed language (or in the case of “baby signs,” visual/gestural communication that is formalized, but does not really rise to the level of a signed language), a child communicates at an earlier age than he or she otherwise would, using something other than crying and pointing. While pointing is good, crying is not as developmentally advanced as using gestures, and can lead to tantrumming in older babies and toddlers when it does not bring the response that is desired.

Because signed language/”baby signs” are more specific, they lead to a desired response much more quickly than crying, and are a very good way to avoid tantrums. If a child is actually using a signed language, or if a parent has been very astute in developing visual/gestural communication, sometimes a non-desired result can still lead to the avoidance of a tantrum, because the child may get an explanation of why the desired result is not forthcoming, and an alternative (eg: “No cookie now. You may have a cookie after dinner. Would you like milk?”)

Whether or not a signed language/”baby signs” lead to earlier or better speech production, they do seem to led to a child who “gets” the concept of formal communication as absolutely soon as possible, so that, in the case of a hearing child, it acts as “speech readiness.” As soon as the child has a few spoken words, he can use them more effectively than a child who has not had the experience of formal communication, and the child understands things like turn-taking in conversation.

In the case of a Deaf child, there is tons of research that Deaf children of Deaf parents have the best written language of Deaf people (on the whole— you can always find individual exceptions), and no matter what BS oralists may push, it is always going to be more effective to learn to lip-reading and orally produce a language that one already knows; albeit, a more important factor for Deaf children in learning to produce oral speech is whether or not they have any hearing. I know two brothers who had Deaf parents. Both went to the school for the Deaf, and had excellent written English. One has no hearing, and one probably would have been called “hard-of-hearing” if he had had hearing parents. Guess which one has really good oral speech? it’s irrelevant, though. They are both happy and successful. (And both Gallaudet graduates.)

So in the case of Deaf children, early exposure to a signed language is one factor of several that leads to success in learning to speak orally. So what? Signed language for a Deaf child is of primary importance for that child’s self-esteem, life-satisfaction, academic success, and eventual independence. Withholding it should be a crime. Speech for a Deaf child is sprinkles on a Sundae— a cute extra, but not necessary. A signed language is the ice cream.

But back to hearing children, momentarily. I don’t know that the goal of “baby signs” was ever to promote speech. I think it was to promote communication, and parent/child bonding. It does seem to do this, but parents need to be aware that more than handshapes are involved. Teaching, and knowing themselves to be visually aware, is also necessary. You can’t have a child just sitting there repeating a sign. The child needs to know how to get an adult’s attention, and maintain eye-contact. When this happens, then real communication happens.

And one last thing: it is a real shame, as well as ironic, that while people are promoting signs for hearing babies, Deaf babies are still denied them in many cases. This needs to stop and yesterday.

TL;DR: signed language is all kinds of good, so who cares?

I’ve known someone whose family had used nothing but British Sign Language for at least six generations. He is Deaf. His parents were Deaf and used BSL with him from birth. His grandparents did the same to his parent, as they were Deaf also. When he came to the USA to study, he had to rapidly learn ASL, as that is completely different from BSL (as different as Arabic or Japanese is from English: they’re in different language families). I don’t know about his personal life, but presumably if he meets an American Deaf woman, marries her, and they have children, the children, Deaf or hearing, would grow up bilingual in ASL and BSL, able to read written English and lip-read (he was a pretty good lip-reader), and if they are hearing, able to speak English as well.

(Note: deaf = a person who cannot hear; Deaf = a member of a culture based on the use of signed language and associated cultural norms. One can be deaf without being Deaf.)

It’s not an “if.” It’s happening every day. If children born to Deaf parents are hearing, they would have a signed language as their first language and learn English, or another spoken language, when they go to school. These children are often called CODAs in linguist lingo: Children Of Deaf Adults. Many sign language interpreters are CODAs, although of course such people can also do anything else they like, with the added bonus of being able to have friends and coworkers among both Deaf and hearing people, and do things like have a conversation while a spoken conversation or lecture is going on.

There was a lovely German film called Beyond Silence (Beyond Silence (1996 film) - Wikipedia ) about a young girl who is the hearing daughter of Deaf parents, and speaks both German and German Sign Language. As I recall, there is a cute scene in it where her school calls in her parents for a conference about her grades or behaviour — but they are stuck using the child herself as the interpreter, and so she, as a mischievous eight-year-old, cheerfully tells her parents that the teacher said everything is fine! She loves her parents but a rift develops between her and them when she becomes a passionate player of the clarinet, an experience they cannot share.

Natalia Roszkowska, below, links me to another lovely short film about a CODA modern dancer, in English and American Sign Language, that came out in 2020 (it features as a supporting character the Deaf actor CJ Jones, whom people might recognize from the movie Baby Driver): CODA, written and directed by Erika Davis-Marsh.

Teaching your child sign language to communicate with you is always a positive, especially in the early stages of development before they can speak with words. And while there are certain limitations to a infants ability to sign complex emotions or thoughts I believe all parents should incorparate some sign language with their new-borns.

The benefits from teaching your baby sign language will change the way you can respond to your child's needs, while also blowing you away that people could go through parenting without teaching their child basic signs.

I am not in anyway saying that if you didn't teach your child sign language before ability to speak that you somehow messed up, but I will explain from my personal experience in reference to 2 nephews and 1 niece of mine.

So my nephews, Eli and Izzy, are now 12 & 10 years old, they were both taught signs from the moment they were born. At the age of 6 months old, each one could let you know when they were hungry, when poop(ed), wanted to be picked up, when full, and accurately point out what they desire. Imagine being able to communicate all those things with your 6 month old child. It's incredible, the key is implicating signs immediately upon each situation.

For example, done/finished, is both hands raised outward in front of you, clench both hands then open stretching all fingers out, repeat 3+ times.

A quick google search will show you how simple these signs are (I probably over explained that one once you see the visual representation is easy to understand)

If you demonstrate these gestures for your child, you quickly see a response. The association of them pooping has been shown to them so many times before they have developed the muscles to sign it, that when they have developed the muscles they are naturally telling you things like ‘I'm hungry' or ‘I'm done' with the signs you've been teaching.

This, in the scenario of my nephews, lead to early development of several other things and a extremely fast adaption of using the toilet,

My sister became big fan of this method which turned into additional signs being taught to display a wider range of needs and even while they both learned to talk at same rates as any other child, the signing allowed them to have communicate long before words or sentences. Both nephews of mine are extremely gifted children to this day, while Izzy would be considered ahead of most children I can not speak in a; ‘matter of fact way’ that the sign language was attributed to their current intellectual level.

However it is proven that children should learn everything possible, especially language(s), before the age of 11 will greatly change the way in how they are able to absorb additional education in language.

It is proven that teaching your child 2 languages before age 11 will make it much easier for them to learn additional languages later in life. Whereas someone who only has 1 language up to age 11, is going to experience quite a bit of difficulty not only in learning but remembering other languages. Obviously it's not impossible to became extremely gifted in many languages with training, it's simply how your brain develops and processes language, how quickly, why it can learn some languages easier than others is largely unknown, same goes for those who seem to be naturally gifted in learning additional languages. Much study needs to be done in this area of the brain.

With my niece, where my brother didn't nearly go to the same lengths as my sister in teaching his daughter a wide range of signs he did teach her the essentials which has made his life much easier. I'm interested to see upcoming results of the method for she is only over a year old now, you can already tell she is going to be a little genius.

These are personal experiences I'm speaking from, the scientific data to back these claims up are out there I’m sure.

But I don't see any reason why someone wouldn't want to be able to communicate more easily and much earlier in your child's life. Only positive things come out of it.

When I discovered my baby’s vocal chords were damaged in a life-saving surgery, I knew she needed an expressive language. She could hear, so her receptive language was English. But she couldn’t speak, or make a sound. At six months of age she started clasping her hand ‘as if ‘ to say bye bye. I figured she needed a language so she could express herself. I chose American Sign Language, known as ASL.

That meant I had to Sign and speak whenever communicating with her. So I enrolled in an ASL course offered at my local high school, which had adult ed classes at night. I was a serious student, did all my homework, and by the end of a year I was actually able to string basic thoughts together.

John Goul, a Deaf man teaching the ASL adult class, was incredibly generous and helpful when he learned of my reason for wanting to learn ASL. He offered to come to our home to teach her, and to bring his Deaf daughters over so his children could play together with my son and daughter. I met his wonderful wife Shelley. We all became good friends.

Still, I wasn’t fluent and neither was my daughter as she approached her first, then second year. I kept studying. I kept Signing to her. Her brother, adept with languages, learned to communicate with his sister and could decode her communication as well as I could. Her father is not adept with languages at all, and he asked our son and me to translate what our daughter was communicating whenever there was Signing he didn’t understand.

It wasn’t easy but it was well worth it. She did not lag behind developmentally. She could express herself! Some of her favorite signs which developed between 6–9 months were:

• I like
• I don’t like
• Good
• Not good
• Bad
• Beautiful
• Mommy
• Daddy
• Brother
• Grandpa
• Grandma
• I want
• I don’t want
• No
• Yes
• Why?
• Where?
• What?
• How?
• Again!
• Let’s do it again!
• Show me, show him, show her, show them
• Shoes
• Good morning
• Tree
• Flower
• Dog
• Let’s go!
• More
• Cookie Monster (Sesame Street character)
• Love
• Sleep
• It hurts (here)
• Bath
• Choking/can’t breathe
• Water
• Swing

Babies and toddlers don’t have sophisticated expressive language but are instead working toward language fluency. This holds true for all babies learning all languages, whether oral or signed.

To gain fluency, a child needs to be exposed to fluent native speakers or fluent native signers. Fluency isn’t easy to teach or to learn, and it takes years of constant exposure to the target language, and constantly improving in expressing and receiving that language, in order to become fluent in it.

That said, it is good for babies like mine, and perhaps yours too, to be able to express with specificity that she wants her brother, or something hurts in her belly, or she can’t breathe, or she wants another piece of broccoli (“more”) or doesn’t want more (“I don’t want it!”).

I was horrified when I applied to The Regional Center to request ASL services for my daughter and was denied the request because she was under five years of age. I asked — what about Deaf children?! I thought it was thoughtless and cruel to deny any child an expressive language.

With the help of my caseworker, a public health nurse named Lawren Miller Askew, I appealed their denial of services based on age discrimination. I brought my daughter and new, proposed language to the appeal meeting. I said “When a Regional Center client demonstrates a present ability to learn language, s/he is eligible for language instruction.” Note there is no age limit or age-related threshold in this proposed language.

When the meeting was over, I told my daughter to thank the staff present at the appeal hearing, and to say goodbye. She Signed “Thank you!” and “bye bye!”

We won the appeal. At 8 months of age, she was just too cute to resist. And my reasoning was unassailable. The law in the State of CA at all Regional Centers was changed. Ever since, when any child demonstrates a present ability to learn a language, s/he is eligible for Language instruction, including American Sign Language.

Ok, so I am profoundly deaf, my wife has hearing as sharp as a bat. Of our three hearing children all developed language perfectly well. Our oldest daughter developed it a little too well. She was speaking four languages by 14 as well as Dutch Sign language. She is now in law school. Our youngest two each speak three languages as well as Dutch sign. Our oldest son was born deaf. Now in his teens he speaks two languages and fluent in Dutch Sign language.

Given this I am going to say no, children of deaf parents do not have language delays.

Edit: we are fostering a five year old congenital deaf child refugee from Ukraine . He came to us able to use Ukrainian sign language to some degee. Our Ukrainian liaison worker say he has some poorly spoken Ukrainian vocabulary and was very surprised to hear him use Dutch words. I would love to take credit for those but I suspect it has more to do with his interaction with our children. He is also picking up Dutch Sign as well as noticed.

Learning a signed language damages babies’ speech development in exactly the same way that feeding children a healthy diet, exposing them to educational toys, listening to classical music, and reading books to them from an early age damages their speech development.

In other words: Anything that stimulates a kid’s brain is going to be good for the kid.

Learning a signed language does not delay a child’s speech development. The initial stages of vocal babbling and word formation occur at exactly the same ages for hearing children who are being raised in oral-only and oral/sign environments.

When child language development experts discuss the various stages of language development in very young children, one of the things they do is count the number of words in the child’s vocabulary. At a certain age, a child who is developing normally will be expected to have a vocabulary of 50 words, 100 words, or 200 words.

Raising a child in a bilingual environment throws a monkey wrench into the “count the number of words in the kid’s vocabulary” test. A bilingual child who has a vocabulary of 50 words in Language A and 50 words in Language B has a total vocabulary of 100 words. But if you test the child only in Language A, the child appears to have a language delay. But it’s not a true language delay. The apparent deficit is an artifact of the test, because the tester ignored the child’s vocabulary in Language B.

The apparent language delay disappears by the time the child is old enough to enter preschool.

Final thought:

What is your ultimate goal for this child? Is your goal to produce a 12-month-old child with the biggest vocabulary on the block? Or is your goal to produce a successful adult in the long run? If your goal is to produce a successful adult, there’s no such thing as too much language exposure.

I taught my daughter (who is not deaf), to sign by the time she was 13 months old. I taught her how to identify print letters and then smaller whole words starting at 9 months old. (She was able to point to words in storybooks, when I asked where was a word and I would spell it and say it again.)

I worked with flash cards for each process.

To learn sign, we worked with flash cards and repetitive spelling with sign. ie…”apple”

…I would shape the letter “A” in my hand and then “A” with her little baby fingers and point to the apple on the flash card, etc. When we would eat apples, I would sign “apple” to her and so on.

Teaching my daughter to read was basically the same process, minus the signing.

I did all this with my child because it is my learned understanding that babies can be taught anything. I believe this to be true….and very, very amazing!

The more you challenge the mind of a baby, the more you will promote growth to brain cells and naturally increase neuron activity. This makes for a more intellectual child; and ultimately, this intellectual child will most likely become a more productive part of society.

Deaf or not, babies are as capable as we encourage them too be.