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Comment by yojo | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, I tried this with both my sons. They both started using the gestures the same day they started actually talking :-/

I have friends who had much more success with it, but the value will largely depend on your child’s relative developmental strengths. A friend’s son with autism got literally years’ benefit out of the gestures before verbal speech caught up.

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My kids both picked it up, but my younger was similar. Being able to sign "please" and "all done" helps anyway because "eeess" and "a ya" are what she actually says.

Same with my nephew. He also has autism and the first thing the speech therapist did when he was 3 was teach him simple sign language. It became such a great catalyst for communication. He's nowhere near his his age (now 6) developmentally but within ~6 weeks he went from completely non-verbal to actually vocalizing the simple words he learned the sign language for.

> FWIW, I tried this with both my sons. They both started using the gestures the same day they started actually talking :-/

Could still useful: instead of shouting across the playground on whether they have to go potty you can simply make the gesture with minimal embarrassment. :)

I also usually had success with signs when the child was otherwise too emotional to verbalize their desire. They're really upset and crying hard so it is hard to talk especially when talking clearly is already a challenge, but signing "milk" or "eat" or "hurt" or "more" can come through easily.

Wow I had not considered this at all. We used a bit of sign language before my toddler started talking, but have more recently run into these situations where big feelings are crowding out speech and it’d be useful to get anything through. I’ll give this a shot tomorrow

Yeah, a handful of signs is useful for adults in many situations where voice comms don't work. And, at least in my circles, there's a small shared vocabulary of signs that there's a good chance will work. Potty, ouch, sleep, eat, maybe a couple more.

Tread carefully: the sign for poop looks close enough to a crude gesture (cruder than just shouting "poop" at a playground, as it turns out) that an ignorant bystander might take it significantly wrongly.

There's probably variation among babies. One of my nephews would examine his feet if you asked them where are his shoes, even before walking. He got so proficient with signs that it delayed talking; he preferred signaling and grunting :/

> He got so proficient with signs that it delayed talking; he preferred signaling and grunting :/

Please don't blame this on the signs! This doesn't mean that he would have learned to speak earlier if not for the signs. I'd be glad that he could communicate proficiently at all.

The gestures also help disambiguate some words. Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between "Mama", "More" and "Milk" the way my toddler pronounces them, but her gestures make it clear...

>They both started using the gestures the same day they started actually talking

were you always talking when you signed to them? maybe they thought it went together.

I had the opposite experience. My daughter had multiple signs down by 7 months.

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