Look Who's Talking With Their Hands

Jennifer Neale's daughter started using words at the age of seven months. Elena, now 21 months old, isn't unusually gifted with language; rather, she communicates using her hands. Neale, a University of California doctoral candidate in ecology, and her husband Ben Sacks, began using simple gestures with Elena when she was five months old, after hearing about the benefits of sign language for babies. Soon, Elena was able to sign such requests as more, eat, sleep, and change. "It was easy and fun," says Neale, adding that her daughter probably knew 200 signs by the time she was a year old. "We never had a period where we couldn't figure out what she wanted." When Elena was speaking a few months later, her vocabulary was extensive--because, Neale believes, of her experience with signs.

A growing body of research supports Neale's faith in the power of sign language for babies. Once considered useful only for the deaf or hard-of-hearing, sign language is becoming a powerful tool to promote early communication for everyone. The reason: Professionals say children can communicate with hand signs much sooner than they can master verbal skills. "It's a question of how children mature," says Marilyn Daniels, an associate professor of speech communication at Pennsylvania State University and author of a forthcoming book called Dancing with Words: Signing for Hearing Children's Literacy.