In the popular movie Meet the Fockers, you might recall Robert de Niro’s character teaching his grandson to communicate using signing. In the movie, this is clearly played for laughs, but pre-speech communication and development is a serious subject and baby signing is gaining in popularity worldwide with parents and experts alike.

Babies are clever little people and have an amazing ability to communicate with their parents through movement. Even in utero, a kick or jab is baby reacting to outside stimulus. But a baby’s first attempts at spoken words usually won’t occur until around 12–18 months old as the complex co-ordination of their breathing, tongue, mouth and vocal chords continues to develop and strengthen.

Baby signing offers an effective method of bridging the communication gap when baby hasn’t found his or her voice yet. From as early as six months, babies can use their hands to tell you what they’re thinking, how they feel and what they want. Stimulating expressive communication in pre-verbal children with signing is becoming increasingly popular with parents to bridge the required link from pre-verbal to verbal communication.

“Communicating with your baby is a wonderful experience,” says Natalie Munro, Lecturer in Speech Pathology at the Faculty of Health Sciences at The University of Sydney. “Most, if not all, babies enjoy listening to their caregiver’s voice and watching their caregiver’s face. Babies are struck by facial movements and natural speech rhythms and melodies. Babies have learnt to understand spoken language in this way for thousands of years. Caregivers often use naturalistic gestures that accompany spoken speech. For example, when you want to pick your baby up, caregivers will often look at their baby, say ‘up’ and gesture an upward motion with their arms and hands.

“All these word learning ‘cues’ (eye gaze, speech and hand gestures) help a young child to understand their parents’ intention. Over time, these word-learning cues also help young children to develop their own intentions. Babies first show you their intention by looking at desired objects, pointing, using speech sounds, combining all three of these and eventually by using words.

“Baby signing offers gestural support for words or concepts that the caregiver is trying to impart and, if used as a consistent cue, babies can also use ‘signs’ to help express themselves.”

My own child, Rafferty, began “talking” to us at about 10 months of age through keyword signing and could soon tell me without difficulty or frustration if he was hungry, thirsty, bored or tired.

When a child signs it simply means they are communicating effectively, a huge plus in the early stages of development. But, adds Munro, “It is essential to remember that communication between a caregiver and a hearing baby will occur because of all the available word-learning cues in a baby’s environment, not just the use of a particular hand gesture. It is also important that hand gestures do not occur in isolation; that is, they should be accompanied by speech and eye contact.”

Other parents who watched as my son and I signed together would question its worth and often asked me if I was worried that signing would hinder his desire to speak. The short answer to that question is no! You’ll have to excuse the parental bragging that’s about to follow, but this particular mummy is extremely proud of her little chatterbox.

Having just turned two, Rafferty has a seemingly inexhaustible vocabulary that child health and care professionals have likened to that of a child at least 12 months older. He regularly uses perfectly formed sentences of seven and eight words. He also uses longer imperfectly formed sentences that can occasionally cause embarrassment to the aforementioned mummy, as his cognitive understanding of what he is saying can sometimes fall a little short. Apologies go out to the slightly rotund man in our local store whom he accused, at length, of being pregnant this morning.

Do I think my son is a prodigy who has inherited his verbal smarts from the latent genius of his parents’ DNA? Or that I have the next Oscar Wilde or Mark Twain on my hands? No, not really. What I do think is that, through baby signing, Rafferty was offered a head start in communication and conversation that has been extremely beneficial in his development.

Suggestions that signing may interfere with a baby’s speech and language development are not backed by ongoing studies into the topic, which are more likely to indicate that signing babies, just like my son, typically speak earlier, have larger vocabularies and are better readers than non-signing babies.

“There is no evidence that I’ve found to suggest that signing will delay speech. In fact, every piece of research I’ve seen supports and encourages signing and gesturing with your children,” says Emma Kelly of TinySign, an antipodean offshoot of Britain’s pioneering TinyTalk UK. She is also the wonderful instructor who first taught my family Auslan keyword signing.

Kelly says she’s also seen plenty of compelling anecdotal evidence. “In my experience with my three children, I can see how it’s affected their confidence levels and their speech. I teach in the community where I live, so I bump into a lot of parents of children I’ve taught. As well as positive stories regarding their children’s speech, I also hear how confident and well-adjusted these children are. I really believe that confidence stems from self-esteem and the benefits that learning to communicate at an early age gives them.”

Extensive research into the subject has been conducted by various academics. An ongoing study by Californian child development experts Linda Acredolo PhD and Susan Goodwyn PhD (funded by National Institutes of Child Health and Human Development) is particularly noteworthy.

Acredolo and Goodwyn noticed that babies were spontaneously using simple gestures to represent words they were not yet able to communicate orally, prompting them to research the effects that could be had on communication if parents encouraged this process.

Their study saw 140 families with 11-month-old children divided randomly into two groups: signers and non-signers. Each group was followed up over an eight-year period with Acredolo and Goodwyn concluding there was a clear advantage to using signs with pre-verbal children and that signing to babies helped children in developing both language and cognitive skills.