The article that I chose is from the Time magazine a special edition in December 2017. The special edition was about the Science of Childhood. The article that I read can be found on pages 16-20. The title of the article is, Signs of a Happy Baby: Learn to Speak to Your Child without words through a lesson in infant sign language. This is a research on how teaching baby sign language can improve their cognitive and emotional developments. It has also been found that it helps increase the verbal development. This article tells us how infants around 6 months can learn more words in sign language than spoken words up to 18 months. Babies understand more than what the parents probably realize. Infants as young as 6 months old can identify objects such as, apple, banana, or the location of the arm on a picture of the body. Infants at the age of 16 months can speak on an average of 40 words but can comprehend up to eight times that number. However, babies don’t have large vocabularies to express their thoughts and desires verbally until a language burst that occurs around 18 months or later. …show more content…
One group was taught sign language, the other group was given verbal training. The first group who were taught sign language, seemed more advanced talkers than the verbal group. The signing group continued to advance with their verbal skills up to three months that the group with the verbal training. When the author of the NIH study followed up with the children when they were 8 years old, the sign language group IQ scores were 12 points higher than the non-signers, even though they stopped signing. Therefore, these results can be used in early education to improve the cognitive development in