Findings

It turns out that in recent years a whole industry devoted to teaching babies and toddlers sign language has emerged. Parents take classes, costing up to 10-12 euros/class ($15-$19), in which they sing and talk to their baby while performing sign language. Babies gesture naturally, Morgan acknowledges--they may learn to hold their nose for "stinky", for example (UPDATE: Morgan kindly provided a picture for the blog; it shows one of his children making a "hat" gesture). But baby signing proponents argue that infants can actually learn actual sign language and that this has many benefits. Morgan listed a few that the "BS" industry (he used the acronym!) lists on their Websites:

--faster language development

--higher IQ

--better behavior (fewer tantrums)

--earlier literacy

Morgan contends, however, that there's little data supporting any of those claims. The BS industry, especially when they propose that parents _need_ to do baby signing, "really misuse research evidence," he told the audience. The BS industry litters its Websites with quotes from scientists, but they're often very old statements or taken out of context, he continued. Morgan noted one Website citing a famous language expert as saying "Language development is over by the time you're 3," although Morgan noted that now few scientists would agree with that statement. BS proponents also toss out science jargon such as "critical periods" to suggest that parents only have a short window in which to help their kids achieve future success, Morgan complained in his talk.

Morgan says that babies simply gesture--it's not a true language. BS classes, he says, are "just intensive gesture-training classes." There's no strong evidence this harms or slows a child's development, Morgan stresses, but there's no need to pay good money for something unproven. Signs are easier to learn than words, he notes, but learning signs doesn't necessarily help word understanding or production. One way to study this is to compare hearing children of hearing parents with hearing children of deaf parents--the latter having been taught sign language as soon as possible. Morgan talked about one small study--about 30 kids in each group--conducted by him and colleagues that suggests the kids of hearing parents actually learn to understand words slightly faster. That's "sort of evidence" against BS as beneficial as the kids of deaf parents have essentially been in "super-intense" baby signing classes, says Morgan.

Should the Society for Neuroscience or the Federation of European Neurosciences come out against baby signing classes? Morgan hesitates at that question. Calling for controlled studies would be a "nice step forward," he says. "I'd love to find that baby signing does make IQ shoot up. [But] I think the pressure to baby sign is just wrong."

--John Travis