Title:	Out of the Hands of Babes.
Authors:	Pritchett, Malika1
Source:	Behavior Analysis Digest International; Fall2008, Vol. 20 Issue 3, p11-12, 2p

-Small study, showed that babies taught the sign for "up", and once the sign was learned, then were allowed to cry until they signed what they wanted learned the sign quickly and cried less.

Another article

Title:	Hands-on babbling.
Source:	Science News; 3/30/91, Vol. 139 Issue 13, p205-205, 1/4p

-Babies babble with their hands long before they start babbling with language.
-Both hearing and deaf babies do this
-Evidence of "unified capacity" for learning spoken language as well as sign language.

Bringing Up Baby with Baby Signs

Notes from reading this article

-Seems to be a socioeconomic component to signing.  No reliable estimates, but seems to be widespread among "professional class workers in university towns". (pg. 5) I wonder if there is a way to add that component into my study, since I work in a university town.
-Signing usually abandoned when hearing child starts speaking. (pg.5)
-Pretty specific to middle-class Anglo-Americans (pg. 6)
-Earlier communication has been noted, but not necessarily linguistic skills advanced, little to no research done on baby's self esteem as relates to being able to communicate earlier (p. 9-10)
-ASL or invented signs? I would prefer to do ASL as much as possible, unless the sign is difficult (ex. help)
-3 case studies done in Central Texas observing babies and baby sign.  None of the families had prior exposure to sign language, and all listed better and earlier communication as the main goal of learning to sign. (p. 13-16)
-Most signs fall into categories: labeling, politeness formulas, requests, displays of knowledge (pg. 14)
-pg. 31 sign language is left behind when speaking begins.
-31-33 may unfortunately re-emphasize misconceptions of sign language (easy, not as good as spoken language, based on spoken language rather than separate entity.)

Reviewing references and index may prove useful.

Sometimes Admitting You Need Help is Hard

So, as usual for me, apparently I was making this whole project a lot more complicated than it needed to be.  I wish I had asked for help earlier than halfway through the semester, but oh well.  Time to play catch up I guess!  And in a way, since I haven't changed my topic that much, I'm not as far behind as I think I am.  But still: I wish I hadn't gotten wrapped in my own life and gotten depressed by the way many of my classmates seemed to be having no trouble at all.  So, to all my other lost classmates: take heart!  I'm right there with you.

So, based on some suggestions by Dr. Solomon, I'm minimizing my project to focusing just on the parents of the babies that come to my library.  I'm going to frame it as part of an on-going process of my library evaluating their story time programming.  This section will be about the baby storytime.  What I hope to do is have a presentation on baby sign at the library, talking about the benefits, and then have a survey about the program and current use of baby sign in the community.  I hope it wouldn't skew my results too much if I include more parents than those that actually attend my storytime.  I am hoping to also get some results on the survey about why they don't come to the baby storytime as well.  In this case, I would be defining babies as anyone under two years of age, since that's the group we market our baby storytimes too.