PRESTOPUNDIT -- "It's a team sport, baby!"

Baby signing -- give your little one the power of language. It will be good for both of you. I recommend it from personal experience with my daughter. We didn't master many signs, but just those few helped us to understand one another. My daughter acquired spoken language so quickly that she soon was using words not so long after learning some signs. Research shows that the signing actually speeds up the process of learning spoken language. It seems to have played such a role with my little girl. Sign language learning can begin at about 8 months, quite a bit before before most babies can speak. The classic book on all this is Baby Signs: How to Talk with Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk.

And toddlers can learn to read beginning at about 18 months to 2 years. The classic book on this is How to Teach Your Baby to Read. My daughter can read a handful of words, but instruction has been spotty since her little brother appeared on the scene. She recognizes and calls out the words "pizza", "milk", "nose", "hand", "daddy" and a few others, which often catch mommy and daddy by surprise (she reads labels and signs at the grocery store and in the car at surprising times).

Kids are language marvels until about the time they hit puberty, when the part of the brain which learns language begins to freeze up a bit. What I find most remarkable is how a little one can pick up the significance of a word based on so little experience with the word. Sometimes only one use of the word will -- as if by magic -- give them the word, which they will then use correctly in new applications involving very altered contexts. Unbelievable. Somehow are brains seem to have come hard wired for solving Wittgenstein's "going on together" problem. (See Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations). Remarkable creatures, we.

Posted by Greg Ransom | TrackBack