AFAIK, most popular "sign with your baby" books are ASL.

 

Signing for infants is ASL. I fully believe in signing to infants, my DD signed "more" and "eat" at 7 months to me, we are currently signing to our 5 month old. It is great for building vocabulary at an early age, plus my friend has a son with Down syndrome and though he is behind with talking he can more than communicate due to his large vocabulary of signs, cool stuff.

 

There are actually infant signing books that are NOT ASL, but many of them are. The trend now seems to be towards ASL rather than away from. Personally, I made sure to research all of my signing purchases to be sure that they are ASL - that way you know that books written by different authors are going to be consistent in their signs. If you go with one that isn;t ASL, then you can only use books written by that same person, and that's rather limiting.

 

http://www.signingtimeacademy.com/ This is actually ASL but geared for infants/young kids. Of course you dont' have to use this method, but if I were going to do signing with my baby (I am) I would want it to be ASL NOT baby sign. It would be like teaching my child a fake language that only we understand vs. a second language.

 

(Saw this in new posts)

Most baby sign programs use ASL signs, but they do not use the ASL language. So, it's a little bit like using French words, but keeping the grammar English. Sure, your child will learn some French words, but they won't learn French. They won't learn the functions and the culture associated with ASL. They'll simply use the words. (ASL syntax is quite different from English, and Deaf culture is also different in many ways.)

That doesn't mean that baby sign/ASL signs are not useful. But I wouldn't kid myself that I'm teaching my child ASL, any more than when dh and I use German words with our kids (we're both fluent in German) that we're teaching them German.

What are the benefits? According to Linda Acredolo, Ph.D., who has conducted research in this area, they are (I'm summarizing her words here from a recent discussion that some of the major researchers in the field had about this very issue in one of the listserves I'm on (I research child language)):

1. Signing helps babies learn to link symbols, objects and meaning. This can help when a child learns words, and might speed up the acquisition of spoken words once the child learns to articulate them.

2. Parents who sign with their babies also tend to 'bathe' their child in words -- they'll repeat the word over and over again while teaching the sign. A well documented effect of language is that the more words a child hears, the faster his/her vocabulary will grow. It's why most middle class kids tend to have vocabularies that outstrip most children who live in poverty - they usually hear more words due to the social contexts they live in.

3. If a child can sign, they can choose the topic of conversation. Research also demonstrates that the best way for parents to 'teach' a child language is to follow their lead and talk about what the child is interested in (at least in our culture).

4. Signing reduces whining for many kids because it gives them a developmentally appropriate way to express their needs. And, success breeds success. The more a child discovers that s/he can communicate, the more they will be motivated to keep communicating, and that usually takes the form of spoken words.

ETA: if you're in Australia, you should teach the Australian Sign Language (also called Auslan, I believe). It's different from American Sign Language in that it's based more on British Sign Language, with influences from other sources. American Sign Language was heavily influenced by French Sign Language. There are quite a few borrowings from ASL into Auslan, but they're not the same.

 

Both of my SILs are deaf and we all use exact english so that's what we taught our kids. A lot of the deaf people we meet use ASL but we don't have a problem communicating with a mixture of the two. I don't see how ASL would benefit over exact english unless you're child is deaf and only talks to other deaf people.

 

Thanks for the thoughts.

I apologize for my lack of clarity in my original post. LynnS6 and MoonStarFalling addressed my underlying question. I'm wondering if I should put the time and effort into using ASL as a it stands as a whole language, not just use the signs.

As I said I can see how this would be difficult because if the grammatical differences, as well as the cultural component. I also see how it could be beneficial in the long run. Either way we'll be using real ASL signs rather than made up signs.

I am located in Australia, but it is not permanent. We'll be moving back to the states while our first is still quite young. So we're choosing to use ASL or ASL based signs, but thank you for pointing Auslan out! My understanding is regionally is extremely important between and within signed language systems.

 

We use what's called "pidgeon signed English" which is ASL signs in the order of spoken English. We do that because our middle son has hearing loss and a neurological condition called Apraxia which means he has great difficulty with spoken language. We "sign-speak" which means we do ASL signs with our spoken language, simultaneously.

It isn't "proper" ASL, but we do it that way so he learns the word-order and sentence structure of spoken English. We hope he will be verbal one day, and even if he's not, we want him to learn the proper sentence structure of English so he learns to write/type correctly. It also is easier for our older son, who does not have hearing loss and who speaks quite well (too well, really!)