By Hazel Parry
Hong Kong - William is 10 months old and is already starting to communicate with his mother. He will say "cat" when the family pet comes in to view and "dog" when he sees a dog.
But William doesn't communicate in the verbal sense. He "signs" the words. He raises his little arms and wiggles his chubby fingers in a very precise and deliberate way.
These gestures may look meaningless to anyone outside his family but to his mother they represent the first milestone in communication with her son and the result of six weeks' efforts she spent teaching him "signing".
Baby-signing - or symbolic gesturing as it is called in academic circles - is sign language for babies.
Parents who have followed the system make all manner of claims, ranging from one who claimed her baby told her when they had a fever by signing the word hot and head to another who claimed her child had a vocabulary of 80 words by the time he was 18 months old.
It emerged in the 1980s in the United States, largely of the work of Seattle-based child development specialist Joseph Garcia and Californian professors Linda Acredolo and Susan Goodwyn.
Garcia began researching signing after noticing how the hearing children of his deaf friends began communicating with signs at a much earlier age than normal children communicate with speech.
"The more I researched, the more I became convinced I was uncovering a treasure," he said later in his book Sign With Your Baby (published by Northlight Communications, Seattle).
Both Garcia's and Acredolo & Goodwyn based their systems on sign-language used by the deaf, the difference being that Garcia advises parents to follow American Sign Language (adapted to British Sign Language in the UK) more closely, saying in doing so it "standardises" the language so a child can be understood by anyone who has learnt the system.
Acredolo and Goodwyn authors of Babysigns (Contemporary Books) recommend a more flexible approach allowing carers to develop and use their own signs.
"People wonder, 'If this is so good, why haven't we been doing it for years?' The truth is, we really have been doing it," says Acredolo.
"We've been waving bye-bye, nodding yes and no - those are really baby signs that we teach our kids. Yet the idea is that this is the tip of the iceberg."
But not everyone is convinced. Some critics see it as yet another chance for pushy parents to be competitive. Concerns have also been voiced that it may hinder speech development although advocates, including Acredolo and Goodwyn, claim the reverse to be true.
Their studies, funded by America's National Institute of Health, claim babies who sign, talk sooner than non-signing babies, have larger vocabularies and display higher IQs at the age of three. They even claim "signing" babies tested at the age of eight had IQs more than 10 percent higher than those who had not signed.
Acrodolo has gone on record as saying the "IQ" factor is not important and signing isn't a gimmick to boost babies intelligence.
"I don't particularly care about the IQ stuff," she said in one interview. "All we really care about is the interaction between parent and child and the richness of the relationship that can be added by baby signs.
"This isn't flash cards and lessons. This should be part of just the normal, everyday interactions with your child."
Health visitor Yvonne Heavyside, of Hong Kong's Matilda Hospital, knows signing can help communication, having experienced a system called Makaton used with special needs children.
However, she says there is a danger the competitive parent could take "signing" too seriously at the expense of other areas of development such as gross motor development.
"Parents can become very intense and obsessive about their baby's development especially in Hong Kong where there is the general feeling they should be paying for classes," says Heavyside who specialises in children aged 0-5.
"Speech development should be a natural process. You start by just talking to your baby, you tell them what you are doing, show them books and progress from there.
"But in saying that any one-to-one time a parent or helper spends with a baby is good, especially if it encourages communication. But it should also be fun."
The general consensus is that parents should start signing with their babies at around eight months old and can expect a result between 10 and 12 months.
William was just over eight months old when his mother first began using signs. At first her efforts seemed to go unrewarded. But about six weeks from the day she started, William suddenly seemed to sit up and take notice.
"There seemed to be a "spark of recognition" in his facial expression which I dared to hope indicated the penny had dropped," said his mother Mary Knowles in Hong Kong.
"Very soon afterwards, he began trying to mimic my movements. It was a defining moment in parenthood. I was amazed a child so young could display such a level of understanding."
Mary says her experiment has been a huge learning experience for her as well as William - a lesson in how not to underestimate the comprehension of one so small.
"It has also encouraged William and I to try hard to find ways to express ourselves to each other when we don't talk the same language," she said. "And who knows how valuable that might turn out to be in 14 years' time?" - Sapa-DPA