Signing Time = Speaking, Maybe?

Here's an update of Ry's language development over the past month since he started speech therapy with the Early Intervention. Ry has began making more sounds, saying more words and babbling more recently. In fact, he has a small expansion of vocabulary over the last two weeks and is willing to parrot the adults more. We have been exposing him to this DVD series - Signing Time as introduced by my friend who has an autistic kid to let Ry learn some sign language so that he can pick up signs to communicate with us. Also, research has shown that learning signs helps a child to learn to speak earlier too.

It was really miraculous how Ry picked up hand signs as soon as he watched the DVDs. He can now sign to us to communicate to us what he wants and can even teach the speech therapist some animal signs too. The best part is that he actually starts saying words that he previously refused to say after learning the signs. So now, he can say words like "more", "dog", "bird", "goat", "cold", "coat", "cook", "wa" for water, "go", "top" for "stop". All these words are usually said together with the signs. My mum and my MIL were initially worried that he would stop learning to speak after he signs but the reality is totally different.

More recently, he even started saying "naught-che" for "naughty" when he tries to scold his little brother for being noisy or when Br touches him with his little feet and hands when lying beside him. He picked that up when I was scolding Br. It was really funny hearing him saying it while imitating me with my index finger pointing at baby Br.

I do think that signing helps Ry to speak sooner and now he has a repertoire of signs he can do and is still adding new signs to his expanding vocabulary. Needless to say, I have bought the dvds to bring back to SG. Below is a link to a videoclip of signing time series showing different animal signs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdhcH5nI45w&NR=1