Use of Baby Signs Emblems in infants attending daycare centers: evidence of transfer from educators to infants

Gestures are precursors of language skills and serve as important tools for interactions between adults and infants (Volterra et al., 2020; Novack & Goldin-Meadow, 2017). Educational programs promoting Baby Signs Emblems (BSE) - also known as Baby Signs programs (Goodwyn et al., 2000) - have been proposed to educators in infant daycare centers (Vallotton et al., 2014). Within these contexts, gesture and speech are frequently produced simultaneously, enhancing interactional dynamics and providing linguistic and social scaffolding for infants (Goldin-Meadow, 2014). Despite this potential, only a few small-scale projects have examined gesture-based programs implementation within daycare centers (Norman & Byrne, 2021), and existing studies have mostly targeted specific populations such as infants experiencing poverty (Romano et al., 2021) or at psychosocial risk (Farkas, 2024). Consequently, our understanding of how gesture-based programs function within typical population in early-childhood educational settings remains limited. In particular, it remains unclear whether educators can effectively transmit BSE to infants during everyday interactions, how infants integrate these gestures into their communicative repertoires, and whether such exposure influences their broader gestural behavior. This highlights the need for systematic investigations of gesture-based programs delivered to educators and embedded in naturalistic routines of early childcare. In order to fulfill these gaps, our study involved 10 daycare centers in Italy, randomly assigned to three groups differing in the training provided to educators: training on BSE use (BS new group), training on Communication and Language without BSE (CL group), and No Training (NT group). A further group of daycare centers that had been using BSE for several years was also included (BS expert group). In total, 153 infants (M = 21.6 months, SD = 7.5) participated in the study. 58 hours of video recordings were collected during mealtime and free play, and all infants’ manual gestures were coded as representational (including iconic, metaphoric, and deictic), emblems (BSE and non-BSE), and pragmatic gestures (Sotaro & Emmorey, 2023). Results show that during mealtime, 73% of infants exposed to BS for the first time (BS new group) produced at least one BSE, corresponding to 17% of the recorded time. Nevertheless, BSE frequency was lower in infants learning BSE from educators in the BS new compared to the BS expert group (p = 0.009). During free play, BSE production was lower in both groups (30% of infants in BS expert group and 16% in BS new group), reflecting the more individualistic activities and fewer communicative exchanges during free play compared to the shared and structured context of mealtime. Additional analyses showed that infants’ BSE were more often produced spontaneously than by imitation, and were more frequently unaccompanied by speech than produced bimodally. When considering overall gestural production, infants in BS new and BS expert groups used more gestures than all other groups. Importantly, when BSE were excluded, this difference remained significant only with respect to the NT group (p < .001), while the CL group showed similar levels to BS new. Across groups, representational gestures were more frequent than general emblems and pragmatic gestures (p < .001). These were particularly frequent in BS new and CL groups, and the majority consisted of deictic gestures, in line with the typical patterns of early communicative development. Overall, these findings show that BSE are integrated into gestural repertoires of infants not previously exposed to these types of emblems. Moreover, they suggest that providing educators with training focused on communication - whether or not it includes BSE - may influence infants’ broader gestural production. This study thus emphasizes the critical role of educators' communicative practices in shaping early gesture acquisition, demonstrating that focused interventions can shape infants' emerging communicative behaviors. These results indicate that these training can enrich the multimodal environment of childcare settings, potentially offering infants supplementary resources for engaging in interactions and for supporting linguistic and social development.