Hey there Tim and Jose and fellow listreaders:
Your question - did the study of children's IQ levels compare non-hearing
children to hearing children? It's a good question, and not very easy to
answer.
I did some research on the Baby Sign book at Amazon.com. On-line excerpts
from this book mention a study done by the National Institute for Child
Health and Human Development:
"In a large-scale experiment funded by the National Institute for
Child Health and Human Development, we studied 140 families with
eleven-month-old babies for two years. One-third of these families were
encourage to use Baby Signs, the other two-thirds were not. Our plan
was to compare the groups periodically to see if the Baby Sign experience
was having any effects - good, bad, or indifferent.
So what did we find? In a nutshell, we found only positive effects
on the Baby Sign babies, who outperformed the other babies in comparison
after comparison. They scored higher in intelligence tests, understood
more words, had larger vocabularies, and engaged in more
sophisticated play. Most gratifying of all, however, were the ways in
which parents described the experience of using Baby Signs. . . ..."
At this point I went to the National Institute for Child Health and Human
Development website, at http://www.nichd.nih.gov/default.htm Using
their search engine, no results were returned with "baby sign" or "infant
sign". "American Sign Language" produced these results:
A big report on how children learn to speak, read and write
http://www.nichd.nih.gov/publications/nrp/ch4-I.pdf
Excerpts:
Daniels, M. ( 1994) showed that pre-K students who learned American Sign
Language ( ASL) did
significantly better than controls on the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test
( PPVT) . In a 1996 study,
Daniels also found that kindergarten students who learned ASL did
significantly better on language
development and vocabulary growth measures of the PPVT than those who had
not learned ASL.
Another mention under Multimedia:
In these methods, vocabulary is taught by going beyond text to include
other media. Semantic mapping and
graphic representations of word attributes are among these methods (
Margosein, Pascarella, & Pflaum, 1982;
Levin, Johnson, Pittelman, Levin, Shriberg, Toms-Bronowski, & Hayes, 1984.
) Newer developments like
hypertext go beyond the single medium of text in attempts to enhance
vocabulary learning. American
Sign Language ( Daniels, 1994, 1996) has been used to increase vocabulary,
capitalizing on encoding in a haptic
medium.
And in the Bibliography:
Daniels, M. ( 1994) . The effect of sign language on hearing children's
language development.
Communication Education, 43( 4) , 291-298.
Daniels, M. ( 1996) . Bilingual, bimodal education for hearing kindergarten
students. Sign Language Studies,
90, 25-37.
Hi Joy, again,
Here is message again for you. Jose
--------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Tim Cook <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Tue, 16 Jul 2002 20:04:50 -0700
Subject: Re: [DBL] Fw: Infants sign before they speak
Message-ID: <[log in to unmask]>
Hi DB Curly..I scrwed up that question..Let me try again
Hi Joy..You said" Children who learn ASL at an early age scored
higher on IQ tests at he age of eight than children who did not learn ASL
at an
early age"
What I am wondering is Was that survey confined to deaf chilren? or
were all children included?
Thanks..Tim
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