Advantages

-"The most important benefit to using sign language with your infant or toddler is his increased ability to use language to communicate. Teaching your baby or toddler signs that correlate with needs and desires will give hime the confidence to communicate."

-"Professor Linda Acredolo (U.C.Davis), and Professor Susan Goodwyn (C.S.U.)...research baby sign language. Their research shows that signing babies have larger vocabularies and improved cognitive development. Baby Sign Language seems to help bridge the gap to speaking for infants. it also seems to get them more interested in learning.
In fact, if a baby has trouble speaking, most speech pathologists will teach the baby to sign as a bridge to speaking. The reason is that talking can be very hard and frustrating for babies. They try to form words but they don't quite come out right. For example, instead of  "ball" the child might approximate by saying "ba". When the words aren't recognized by the parents babies get frustrated and give up. When the baby does the accompanying sign, parents recognize and reward the approximate pronunciation. Over time as the babies speech gets better, they drop signing because it is too slow- much like a walking toddler stops crawling."

In addition to helping young children learn to talk they develop socially and emotionally examples are:
-Reduces frustrations, biting and other aggressive behaviors.
-Helps parents and teachers be more observant and responsive.
-Builds trust between children and their parents and caregivers.
-Allows children to share their worlds revealing just how smart they really are.
-Promotes positive emotional development.
-Boosts children's self-confidence and builds self-esteem.