A Little Change of “S-Pace”

Let's take a detour from our usual focus on baby sign language. Here’s an idea that helps take advantage of the recognition memory skills—the ability to vaguely recognize something as familiar—that babies bring with them when they are born. Have you ever noticed how many habits you’ve fallen into when it comes to “putting” your baby places? For example, it’s quite likely that you routinely put your baby to bed with his head at one particular end of the crib and keep the high chair in the same lace in the kitchen. Why? Who knows! But one thing we do know is that, as a result, your baby comes to expect to see specific things when he runs his head to the right (like the window).

Those spatial relations are well established in his memory for where things happen, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. In fact, such predictability is comforting at any age. Why not, however, a least once in a while, shake things up a bit by changing his position? Now, for example, he has to find the door of his bedroom by turning the other way. By challenging your baby to rethink these spatial memories, you provide food for thought that helps him make his memories about the space around him even richer and more flexible and sophisticated.

By the way, if you'd like to hear more tips that can help you support your baby's thinking and remembering skills, join me for my 2-part webinar, Baby Minds: Nurturing the Seeds of Intellectual Development (Birth to 12 Months). Part 1 will be Weds. 10/16/13 at 6PM (Pacific Daylight Time) and Part 2 a week later (10/23/13) at the same time. (Cost $10 includes both Parts, live and/or recorded.) Click here for more info.

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

Hidden Benefits of Reading the Same Book Over and Over

Even if you are bored with a particular book, reading the same storybook many times over is really good for children. In the case of dialogic reading (incorporating conversation outside of the written text into your reading time) going over the same story more than once enables a child to learn new vocabulary items well enough to us them in answer to questions. This is exactly what researcher Monique Senechal found when she read 3-year-olds a story either one time or three times. Toe two extra times make a big difference in the ability of the children to remember the meanings of ten new target words—like “angling,” “fedora,” and “satchel.” What’s more, when the three readings also included questions to the child (a la dialogic reading), the number of words remembered went up even higher—to average of almost 70 percent.

If that’s not enough to convince you, a study by Peter Jusczyk and Elizabeth Hohne has even shown that by the end of three readings, babies as young as 8 months recognize as familiar the specific words they’ve heard in the story. Unlike the 3-year-olds in Senechal’s study, babies this young aren’t learning what the words actually mean. They are, however, learning to recognize the sequence of sounds from which these words are made. Even at 8 months, then, rereading the stories leaves an impression on a baby’s mind.

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

This Little Piggy Went to Market

I recently posted in this blog a description of an experimental study I did at UC Davis to see if toddlers would use a sign to indicate that they remembered something that had happened 2 months earlier. (They did.) I certainly wasn’t surprised by our findings because I had long been hearing stories from parents indicating real life examples of babies using signs to indicate memories. Here’s one of my favorites:

A roly-poly potbellied pig was 15-month-old Brandon’s favorite exhibition at a street fair in a neighboring town he had never visited before. In fact, Brandon was so enchanted with the pig that he sued his sign for PIG (fingertip to nose) countless times during the day to let his parents know he wanted to see it again…and again…and again. His parents happily obliged, enjoying the fact that he could actually tell them what he wanted. But something even more amazing happened six weeks later. Brandon and his parents visited the town for a second time, and even though there as no street fair and not pig, Brandon suddenly began to sign PG with great glee. At first his parents were confused, but then they realized they were standing in the exact spot where the pig had been six weeks earlier! The fair may have been a distant memory to his parents, but it was clearly still vivid to him. Wow! Where his parents impressed! Not only had he remembered a pig seen long ago, but he had also remembered the exact greasy spot by the sidewalk where it had been, showing his parents just how smart their baby was!

Brandon’s is only one of many stories showing signs being used to talk about memories. Do you have examples of your own? I’d love to hear them! Send them along to me via email at info@babysigns.com (putting Baby Signs in the subject line to make sure I get it.) and maybe they’ll make it into a future posting right here!

Happy Signing! (and don’t forget to look for us on Facebook)

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program and Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

A Study of Signing and Memory

Ask a parent what signs they are most anxious for their children to learn and the answer is likely to be EAT, DRINK, MORE, and ALL DONE—the “Mealtime Signs.” There’s no doubt that these signs are important to both parent and child, but other signs are important as well. Babies use signs for all sorts of reasons besides wanting to eat or drink. One of my favorite uses of signs is to enable babies to talk about their memories.

It comes as a surprise to many parents (and many researchers) that babies and toddlers are, indeed, capable of laying down memories for salient experiences and retrieving those memories after a considerable time. We tested this capacity ourselves in our lab at the University of California at Davis a decade or so ago. Here’s what we did.

Fourteen-month-olds were invited to our lab for a study about signing. While the parent and child were waiting for the experiment to begin, they were in a room with a live mouse named “Mickey” contained in a colorful “house” cage. Not surprisingly, the children were inevitably drawn to the mouse.

When the experiment itself began, the mouse was removed and parents were asked to try teaching a set of signs to their child over the next 2 months. The signs represented different categories (e.g., requests, nouns, adjectives) and included the sign for MOUSE. The parents were told we were interested in which signs were more easily learned.

In reality, the experiment was a test of whether the babies would use a sign to indicate a memory. Specifically, when the families returned to the lab 2 months later there was no mouse in the room and our video cameras filmed the children to see if they would use the MOUSE sign to ask about it, thereby indicating that they remembered the presence of Mickey during their earlier visit.

What did we find? Yes, indeed, we saw enough of the toddlers sign MOUSE with quizzical expressions (or even combined with a WHERE? sign) that we knew we had succeeded! Toddlers can indeed remember an event that occurred 2 months earlier and can use a sign to “say” so!

So, resist the temptation to stop with the Mealtime Signs. Teach signs for lots of other things your baby might want to talk about—and remember!

Happy Signing! (and don’t forget to look for us on Facebook)

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

Babies Remember More Than You Think

There's nothing more fascinating to me than the mind of a baby. That's one reason I find the ability of babies to communicate with signs so interesting. Signs provide a window into a baby's mind. However, their skills don't stop with signing. Dr. Susan Goodwyn and I wrote the book Baby Minds so parents could appreciate how much more competent babies are than many parents suspect. The following story provides an excellent example.

“Who turned off the lights?” would seem to be the most natural question if you suddenly found yourself sitting in pitch-blackness. That apparently wasn’t what was running through two-and-a-half-year-old Miriam’s mind, however, when the lights went out during her visit to the psychology lab at the University of Massachusetts. Instead of questioning, crying, or even reaching toward Mom, Miriam confidently thrust her hands out in front of her s though she fully expected to encounter something interesting just beyond her fingertips.

Now why, when no object had been visible with the lights on, would she expect to find an object out there once everything was dark? It doesn’t seem to make sense—until you learn that this was Miriam’s second encounter with this particular dark room. Along with other children, Miriam had made an earlier visit to the lab to participate in a study of hearing ability conducted by Eve Perris, Nancy Myers, and Rachel Clifton. Miriam’s job during that earlier visit had been to reach out toward a toy that was making noise. When the lights were on, she had both her eyes and her ears to guide her. But when the lights were suddenly turned off, the job was left to her ears. Despite the dark, Miriam and her peers had no trouble finding the toy. Their ears were definitely up to the task.

But now let’s jump ahead again to Miriam’s current visit. Given these previous experiences with the dark room, it certainly makes sense that Miriam would anticipate finding an object out there in the dark. After all, you and I would probably remember a salient event like the one these children experienced. In fact, Miriam’s easy acceptance of the sudden darkness and her confident reaching behavior this time around hardly seem remarkable at all—until you realize that the event Miriam is remembering took place two full years earlier, when she was just six- and-a-half months old!

There’s an important lesson here for parents. Babies are affected by events that happen early in their lives. They may not be able to tell us yet about them, but the traces of the experiences—positive or negative—remain accessible to children for long periods of time and influence their reactions to things later on. So, let’s dedicate ourselves to making as many of those experiences positive as we can!

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to visit us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, PhD.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

“You Want “Goodnight Moon” Again?!”

How many times can one person read the same storybook without going crazy? If you’re under age 5, the sky’s the limit. Or so it seems to weary parents who can be overheard at bedtime pleading with their children, “You want Goodnight Moon AGAIN? But that’s 14 nights in a row!” And then there are the occasions when sleepy parents make sly attempts to shorten the bedtime story just a little but are caught up short when a plaintive voice protests “No Mama! Where comb ‘n brush!?” What’s a parent to do?

The answer is simple. Grin and bear it. Why? Because although reading the same story over and over again may seem to be an imaginative form of parent abuse, your child’s motivation is really a positive one. In asking for the same book again, your child is really eagerly awaiting another lesson in memory development. Children between one and four years are programmed to work hard at practicing remembering things, whether it’s the plot of a certain book or video or the order of events when they take a bath or get dressed in the morning. By reading the same story more than once, you’re providing more chances for them to learn the “script.” They love the challenge and then the pleasure of being able to predict what’s going to happen on the next page. And as the sleepy parent reading “Goodnight Moon” learned, pretty soon your child will be able to fill in the blanks as well as, if not better than, you can!

So, yes, it’s important to read the same books over and over. Doing so is actually another easy way to support your child’s intellectual development.

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis

Parents as Memory Motivators

Babies start remembering things from the day they are born—which way to turn my head to get fed or that Mom’s likely to come when I cry. But these memories are not available to conscious memory. They are the result of repetition of experiences and are laid down automatically. It’s what we call learning!

When language begins to click in, whether signs or words or both, a whole new tool set is available to help boost memory. The availability of words to hang memories on, so to speak, really increases a child’s ability to remember and to do so at a conscious level.

The dawning of language, however, helps memory development in another, less obvious, way. It provides a stronger motivation to try to remember—and parents play an important role here. As children begin to comprehend what is being said around them, they become motivated to join in the conversations, and many of those conversations involve things that happened in the past. “Remember what we did today? We went to the zoo! And do you remember what animals we saw?” What’s more, it quickly becomes clear to children, that Mom and Dad are especially pleased when the children themselves remember.

The implication is clear. If you crave cozy interactions with these big folks, then learn to play the memory game! And how do they go about learning it? By paying attention as adults model good storytelling. Adults literally teach their children about beginnings, middles, and endings by structuring their own narratives in an organized way: “Remember we saw the flamingos when we first went through the the gate? And then we went into the snake house…..”

Given all this, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to learn that children whose parents engage their young children in more conversations about the past are more likely to have better memories.

Happy Signing (and don’t forget to follow us on Facebook)!

Linda

Linda Acredolo, Ph.D.
Co-Founder, the Baby Signs® Program
and
Professor Emeritus, UC Davis