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David_Gerard comments on On the Care and Feeding of Young Rationalists -- Revisited[Draft] [Request for Feedback] - Less Wrong
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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.