The trend for parents to use 'baby sign language' as a way of communicating with their very young children should not take the place of talking to them, the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists has warned.
The college stressed that parents should not feel pressured into buying commercial baby signing programmes, or to learn formal systems such as British Sign Language, for children who had no identified risk of speech and language development problems.
The college's chief executive, Kamini Gadhok, said a crucial part of an infant's learning language was by watching and imitating sounds and words made by friends and family.
Ms Gadhok said, 'We're worried that it is affecting natural communication with parents and the natural gestures which will help children learn a word.'
The college said signing could be counter-productive, placing a greater emphasis on learning to sign than learning to speak, and signing should not take priority over the need for parents to talk to their children.
Professor James Law of the department of language and communication science at City University in London, said baby signing could make parents self-conscious about teaching their children to talk by focusing on learning objectives. 'If you start getting into training regimes there is a danger that the joy of interaction goes out the window.'
He added, 'Anything which helps children associate sounds and words is OK, but I would not want parents to think "I need to learn signs" to do this.'
Professor Sue Buckley, a director at the Down Syndrome Educational Trust in Southsea, Hampshire, said there was evidence that baby signing used in a very specific way supported babies with Down's Syndrome but that it should not be promoted as necessary for children who had no speech and language problems. 'Talking to children, playing with them and looking at books is more important than learning to sign,' she said.
But musician Sasha Felix, who devised the 'Sing and Sign' programme three years ago after signing with her own baby, and whose company runs workshops for nurseries and childminders, said she believed that any criticism of such programmes came from a misunderstanding of what baby signing was really about.
She said, 'It encourages parents to talk to their children. We don't think it's odd to encourage a child to wave goodbye - it's just an extension of that.'
Ms Felix said baby signing was 'natural' because it builds on babies'
ability to gesture and that it encourages speech development. She added that baby signing was useful in nurseries to help infants to feel safe and get used to a new routine, with signs, for example, to communicate when it was time for a snack or time to go home.
