Discussion Details
| Title: | Re: Media: BBC: Baby Signing |
| Submitter: | Mark J. Jones |
| Description: | Dear all,
I saw a report on the Baby Signing movement some months ago on the BBC. It seems to me to be a bit misguided - like giving a kid one of those baby walkers instead of letting it crawl and strengthen upper body as well as lower body muscles ready for bipedalism. That probably sounds very anti-signing, but I don't intend it to, and I'm not casting aspersions on sign languages or sign acquisition or cases of sign-speech bilingualism. Baby Signing just seems a bit faddy, with the possible consequence that children's speech development may be delayed for no good reason. Is speech likely to be delayed at all by something like this? Does anyone have any more expert views on whether or not this is actually a good idea for kids who would otherwise be trying to communicate vocally? Mark Mark J. Jones Department of Linguistics University of Cambridge http://kiri.ling.cam.ac.uk/mark mjj13@cam.ac.uk |
| Date Posted: | 06-Jun-2005 |
| Linguistic Field(s): | Language Acquisition |
| LL Issue: | 16.1769 |
| Posted: | 06-Jun-2005 |
