Proposal for Infant Sign Symposium at SRCD: Do you want to contribute?

[Claire Vallotton]

Dear Infant Sign Colleagues,

I’m putting together a proposal for the upcoming Society for Research
in Child Development (SRCD) conference. The conference is April 2-4,
2009 in Denver Colorado; the proposals are due August 22, 2008.
http://www.srcd.org/submissions2009/

Based on my own work and what I know about other current research on
infant signing, as well as common questions that come up in the
public, I have come up with three infant sign-related topics around
which we could develop a proposal.

Please read over the following symposia descriptions (titles are only
preliminary), and consider whether you have recent research findings
that could contribute to one or more of them. I only plan to submit
one; if we had enough for more than one, someone else could take the
lead on a second. Email me by Monday, July 21 (two weeks from today;
one month before the proposals are due) to let me know whether you are
interested in participating in the symposia. In your email, please let
me know which topic is the best fit for you (or propose an alternate
one), and send me a brief description of your study and/or findings.
Alternatively, if you don’t have any current findings, but would like
to serve as a discussant or co-chair, please let me know that as well
by the same date.

I look forward to hearing from you,

~Claire Vallotton


Infant Signs Reveal the Content of Preverbal Minds
This symposium would focus on WHAT children sign about, or the
purposes for which they use signs (i.e. requests, sharing
observations, self-regulation); this could be largely descriptive in
nature, though it could also present any differences between groups if
you had such findings. We could conclude here with a need to conduct
cross-cultural research on the form and content of infant signs.
This could be a paper symposium (2-4 papers) or a poster symposium
(3-6 posters).

Infant Signs as Intervention: Effects of Infant Sign Experiments on
Children’s Relationships and Development
This symposium would focus on experimental or quasi-experimental
studies showing the effects of infant signing on parent-child or
caregiver-child relationships (or perhaps sibling relationships, if
anyone is doing that?), and on development across multiple domains.
Though it would be great to keep this focused on experiments, we could
conceivably include non-experimental/descriptive findings or those
that utilized within-group variation in signing to predict outcomes.
This could be a paper symposium (2-4 papers) or a poster symposium
(3-6 posters).

Controversy in Conversation: Relationships Between Infant Sign,
Conventional Gesture, and Sign Language
This would make a good Roudtable Discussion Symposium, with 3 or 4
presenters/discussants. We could focus the conversation and research
findings on some of the current questions/controversies about infant
sign, i.e. (1) the relationships between infant sign/conventional
gesture/sign language (i.e. complement, support, or competition?
Related to this, Where in the brain is infant sign? Is it “language”
like ASL, or is it “gesture”?); (2) whether or not infant signing is
good for children/child-parent relationship, or an attempt to “push”
development; (3) Whether infant sign reveals what is already in the
infant mind, or gives children the tools for thought.


Claire Vallotton, PhD
Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University
(530) 304-7403