The impact of baby sign classes on early communication development: An exploratory study
preprint
OA: closed
Abstract
Current research regarding Baby Sign and its effect on early language and communication development is inconclusive. This study investigated the effects of Baby Sign class attendance on early language and communication development, when the possible effects of birth order, nursery attendance, and multilingual family background were also taken into account. Participants (130 parents of children aged 12-48 months) completed online questionnaires on nursery attendance, language exposure, and experiences with Baby Sign. Language and communication development were assessed using the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (Bayley-III) Parent reported Communication subsection. Results found a significant interaction between Baby Sign attendance and birth order, with firstborns scoring significantly higher on the Bayley-III than laterborns in the Baby Sign group. Additionally, in the Baby Sign group, children from multilingual homes scored significantly higher than children from monolingual families. These findings suggest that Baby Sign may interact with birth order and multilingual development.
Full text
2,162 characters
· extracted from
oa-doi-fallback
· 2 sections
· click to expand
Abstract
Current research regarding Baby Sign and its effect on early language and communication development is inconclusive. This study investigated the effects of Baby Sign class attendance on early language and communication development, when the possible effects of birth order, nursery attendance, and multilingual family background were also taken into account. Participants (130 parents of children aged 12-48 months) completed online questionnaires on nursery attendance, language exposure, and experiences with Baby Sign. Language and communication development were assessed using the Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development (Bayley-III) Parent reported Communication subsection. Results found a significant interaction between Baby Sign attendance and birth order, with firstborns scoring significantly higher on the Bayley-III than laterborns in the Baby Sign group. Additionally, in the Baby Sign group, children from multilingual homes scored significantly higher than children from monolingual families. These findings suggest that Baby Sign may interact with birth order and multilingual development.
Supplementary Material
File (manuscript for submission 11-01-25.docx)
- Download
- 68.35 KB
Information & Authors
Information
Version history
Copyright
This work is licensed under a Non Exclusive No Reuse License.
Keywords
Authors
Metrics & Citations
Metrics
Article Usage
259views
107downloads
Citations
Download citation
Emese Nagy, Eilidh Mullin.
The impact of baby sign classes on early communication development: An exploratory study. Authorea. 15 January 2025.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.173693194.46996119/v1
DOI: https://doi.org/10.22541/au.173693194.46996119/v1
If you have the appropriate software installed, you can download article citation data to the citation manager of your choice. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click Download.
For more information or tips please see 'Downloading to a citation manager' in the Help menu.
Text is read by the "Ask this paper" AI Q&A widget below. Extraction quality varies by source — PMC NXML preserves structure cleanly, OA-HTML may include some navigation residue, and OA-PDF can have broken hyphenation. The publisher copy (via DOI) is the canonical version.
My notes (saved in your browser only)
Ask this paper
Answers must be backed by verbatim quotes from this paper's full text. Hallucinated quotes are dropped automatically; if no verbatim passage answers the question, we say so. How this works
Citation neighborhood (no data yet)
We don't have any in-corpus citations linked to this paper yet. This is a recent paper (2025) — citers typically take a year or two to land, and the OpenAlex reference graph may still be filling in.
Source provenance
- europepmc
- last seen: 2026-05-20T01:45:00.602351+00:00
- unpaywall
- last seen: 2026-06-02T02:00:03.124865+00:00