New Uses for Sign Language?

Almost forty years ago, when my daughter was less than nine-months-old, I watched her wave her hands about in intricate patterns, turning them this way and that, and wriggling her fingers back and forth. Her vocal activity then consisted of crying, laughing, and mono-syllables; la-la, ma-ma, She had not figured out how to make most of the sounds, but she could definitely move her hands.

I wondered then whether infants wouldn’t learn sign language more easily than speech. Part of that was because I was alone all day with my baby, and didn’t have anyone else to talk with most of the time. So, the notion that an infant might be able to communicate ideas with her hands was exciting. It is only within the last few months that I have seen articles in the leading parenting magazines, which state that you can teach a nine-month-old infant to express her needs with her hands; such as “I’m hungry,” and “I’m poopy,” instead of merely crying. Teaching a child these things could also contribute to their emotional maturity, as the child would learn early on that she does not always need to scream and cry to get her needs met.

Unfortunately, I did not know anyone at that time who could have helped me learn sign language so that I could teach some to my daughter. Nor could I find any studies that might prove it could be easier for infants to learn sign language than speech. Do the children of deaf people learn how to communicate with their hands earlier than most children learn how to talk? No one I knew at the time could say. And what about those Indian tribes that primarily use sign language to communicate; do their children learn to do this earlier than children from conventional society learn to speak?
Vocal speech depends on the development of three centers within the brain; Broca’s area for producing speech, Wernicke’s area for understanding what we hear, and the angular gyrus where we organize our thoughts. We have seen the unfortunate results, when any these areas are damaged through accident or stroke and the victim needs to relearn how to talk. But, does sign language go through these same speech centers? Perhaps someone who has studied brain function could say. We know that chimpanzees can learn to express a wide range of ideas with American Sign Language. These animals do not have the first two speech areas in their brains. This would indicate that sign language may bi-pass the Broca’s and Wernicke’s areas in the human brain, making it a marvelous tool for injury to those areas. This would make a great area for further study.

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