= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
JGWeissman comments on On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists -- Revisited[Draft] [Request for Feedback] - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (87)
One thing I noticed worked well with my cousin's daughter was teaching her sign language before she could speak. It was really cool that she could communicate what she wanted instead of crying. I'm not sure if there are any long term effects. One minor side effect is that when she started talking, she had to be encouraged to vocalize instead of signing.
Kids can learn to sign before they can learn to speak? Fascinating.
Vocal articulation is hard, requiring the simultaneous coordination of glottis, velum, tongue, and mouth, not to mention airflow. Hands are bigger, the movements don't need to be as precise, and some of the signs partially resemble the thing/action they represent.
Yes indeed. Doesn't seem to affect their later speech, AFAIK, and reduces frustration.
Sweet. As soon as they invent babies that don't have any bodily functions I'm going to parent one and it'll be sign language from the start.
Language is a bodily function.
Saying "shit, eat, drool, wee, vomit, burp, ooze snot, etc" sounds crude and there is a reasonable chance that I would forget something. There are so many gross fluid related things that humans do, especially when they have minimal control of themselves. I think the euphemism is fairly common.
Babies don't seem to be able to learn to sign all that sooner than they learn to talk.
They're like chimps for a while - the hands work better than the mouths. I babysat a kid who could sign "more", "drink", "cereal", and "banana" before she could say anything useful. Also, the signs are designed to be easy, while the most useful English words were not (otherwise "ba" and "um" would mean something useful, because those are usually the first sounds we manage.)
Based mostly on anecdotal evidence and personal experience, it does delay verbal speech somewhat. Probably because it reduces the frustration associated with not communicating one's needs, and thus the incentive of learning speech.
Interestingly, the kids probably switch to speech once they cannot express their wishes and desires using gestures and signing anymore - not because they are incapable of adapting more complex rules for signing, but because their parents typically wouldn't understand them anymore. Those complex wishes that necessitate complex signing rules - or speech - develop at a later time, thus delaying speech if signing is available.
I think that bilingualism also delays speech somewhat. (But I am not sure about this information.) If that is correct, then spoken + sign languages are simply another instance of bilingualism.
A coworker of mine had some problems to get her son admitted to a top school here in Chile. The kid lives in a bilingual home and speaks both English and Spanish at a level below the level of a monolingual kid.
This looks like a positive data point for your hypothesis.
Not quite. The difference is that bilingualism (which also has a host of other cognitive advantages and has been associated with e.g. being a protective factor against dementia) will lead to both languages being delayed, while sign language will develop even earlier than spoken language, and then delay the appropriation of spoken language.
Also, not any sort of a communication should be categorized as "language" as far as our brains are concerned, we have specialized areas associated e.g. with coordinating spoken speech and mapping concepts to speech, as opposed to hand motions (i.e. Broca's area).
I know approximately half a dozen kids who were raised this way, and they seem to have pretty normal range of speech abilities, not that I'm any kind of expert.
Yes — one of the limiting factors on learning to speak is the development of the neural wiring to control the muscles involved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_sign_language
A few colleagues told me how they taught their kids to sign and how it reduced frustration, so I looked it up, my notes are here. A lot of the papers claiming benefits from sign language seem to be from the same few people, and when I looked for the opinions of others, I got:
... so it may have some small benefit, but nothing huge.
We tried teaching ours a few simple signs, the only ones that stuck were those for eating and drinking. Now he's speaking a bit, so there's not much point any more.
The study you quoted only seems to address if signing helped the child learn spoken word labels about certain toys.
The (possible) benefit of signing is that the child can communicate with you about whether they are hungry, thirsty, cold, hot, have a wet diaper, etc.--not about whether the child can name different toys. The study doesn't address whether or not sign language reduces frusteration in children or whether children can learn signs for how they feel faster or slower than they can learn the same spoken words.
== removing some frustration from the early childhood experience
to use my goal taxonomy, I don't think signing is being presented as a solution to goal 1, but as one for goals 2 and 3 -- you and the infant will be happier if the infant can communicate to you specifically that ey want food, rather than generally that ey are in distress and the world sucks and WAUGGGGHHHH