From the hands of babes...

Give me milk! I like bubbles! Where are the ducks?

Babies may not be philosophers, but they do have something on their minds. And a growing number of parents are joining baby sign language classes to try to communicate with their children before they can speak.

While the babies in the classes have perfectly good hearing and will soon be talking anyway, the benefits claimed by proponents, which include a rise in IQ, are luring suburban parents determined to give their children the best possible start.

''This is great," said Wayland resident Amy David, who was taking a signing class recently in Needham with her 9-month-old daughter, Zoe. ''She's at the age where she gets frustrated and kind of whines." That frustration could dissipate if Zoe knew how to communicate, her mother hoped.

David, 32, was one of eight mothers gathered at the brand-new Isis Maternity center for the first of six one-hour classes, which will introduce children to gestures representing ''more," ''book," ''drink," ''eat," ''hurt," ''dog," ''cat," ''milk," ''bubbles," and ''duck," just to name a few.

Previously located only in Brookline, the Isis center, which opened a second branch last month in Needham, drew mothers from Boston, Arlington, and Medway for the class.

Signing to babies who can hear is not new. In fact, research on the subject dates to at least the 1980s. But it may be on the verge of going mainstream.

California-based Baby Signs Inc., the program that the Isis center uses, made a deal in January with Gymboree Play & Music, which has 530 locations in 27 countries, to offer its signing classes there.

And Diane Ryan, the founder of a Web-based company called KinderSigns.com, which provides baby signing information online, just this month signed a contract to write ''The Complete Idiot's Guide to Teaching Your Baby to Sign," which is due out in the fall.

Locally, the classes have been popular, according to Isis Maternity cofounder Johanna Myers McChesney, who said interest here seems to be magnified by the large population of well-educated, older, first-time mothers.

''It's really just taken off," she said of the signing classes. ''We can't keep enough of them on the schedule at our two locations."

Jessica Weatherhead, 32, of Medway, said she learned about infant signing through word of mouth, and decided to try it with her 14-month-old daughter, Tess. Weatherhead was intrigued after seeing that a friend's daughter, who is six weeks younger than Tess, had mastered 10 signs after taking the class.

''It'll be interesting to see if they can communicate with each other," she said after the first day of class.

Linda Acredolo, cofounder of Baby Signs, is one of the best-known names in baby signing circles for her work on a $500,000 study funded by the National Institutes of Health in 1989.

Acredolo, who has a doctorate in child development, became interested in signing when in 1982 she noticed her year-old daughter making up signs of her own.

With colleagues, she began researching signing and discovered that most babies will make up a couple of signs on their own, but parents don't generally encourage it because they think it might impede verbal development, said Acredolo.

The NIH-funded study followed 103 babies -- one-third of them were taught to sign and the rest were part of control groups. The children who signed showed stronger language development, according to Acredolo, and they had higher average IQs (by 12 points) by the time they were 8 years old. The results were published in 2000 in the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior.

''We found that the signing children were learning to talk sooner, not later," said Acredolo. ''Our data has really prompted this worldwide movement, because finally parents know this isn't going to hurt the kids."

She believes that signing is to talking as crawling is to walking. Crawling gets babies excited about mobility, so they look for a better way to get around, just as signing gets them excited about communication before they find the world of spoken words, said Acredolo.

She cowrote a book on the results in 1996, ''Baby Signs: How to Talk With Your Baby Before Your Baby Can Talk," which has sold half a million copies.

Acredolo said she also sees a new wave of interest in baby signing. Outside of the Gymboree agreement, Baby Signs has trained 500 independent certified instructors -- with 150 of those trained in just the past month, she said.

Acredolo gives some of the credit to Hollywood. In the movie ''Meet the Fockers," released last year, a signing baby sparked giggles -- and interest, she thinks.

The mothers (no fathers were in attendance) interviewed at Isis classes were first-time parents. They were a mix of stay-at-home and working mothers.

Catherine Snow, a professor specializing in language and literacy development at Harvard's Graduate School of Education, said that for some, baby signing is certainly ''the luxury of excessive parenting."

But she also said that children under normal circumstances generally benefit from attention and interaction, and there's no evidence that signing could delay language development.

Sign language could be particularly helpful for children with some kind of verbal delay, such as that associated with autism, and it could also help mitigate the ''terrible 2s," she said, a notoriously difficult period of child development that could very well be related to the complexity of communication. At that age, normally developing children have a good idea of what they want to say but can't say everything they want to, said Snow.

Acredolo said she is interested in making the program available to low-income and teenage parents, and she plans to take that up in an informal talk with members of the Congressional Biomedical Research Caucus next month.

There's already competition in the baby signing business.

Vincent Kiteley is the director of sales and marketing for Seattle-based Sign2Me, which is also based on academic research but exclusively uses American Sign Language.

He was critical of Baby Signs because it uses a mix of American Sign Language with new signs that are meant to be easier for tiny hands to make.

''In the same sense you wouldn't teach a made-up spoken language, we do not believe it's proper to make up a signing language," he said.

Children don't articulate words perfectly when they first start trying but learn to with help; the same is true of signs, said Kiteley.

''The whole concept is still in its infancy," said Kiteley, who predicted that as interest grows, there would be more of a demand for American Sign Language than for the Baby Signs language. ''The general market that knows what it is is still small."

Sign2Me, like Baby Signs, has instructors all over the country and is also taught in some Gymboree centers, but the company has only one instructor in Massachusetts.

Baby Signs lists seven instructors and locations in the Boston area on its website.

A Globe reporter observed two Isis classes, one in Brookline where the children were in their fifth week, and a first day of class in Needham.

In Needham, the babies weren't signing yet but cooed and hummed what seemed to be cheerful approval of all the proceedings. Sometimes they attentively watched their mothers make signs; other times they were more interested in one another. In the more advanced Brookline class, there was some semblance of signing -- signs for ''milk" and ''dog" were spotted -- but it was impossible to tell whether the babies were communicating or just mimicking.

Maggie Magner, who led the two classes, is a believer who said she has seen signing work with her own kids. She has two sons, ages 3 and 4, but she only taught the younger one to sign. He talked much earlier than his older brother, she said, and was much less prone to tantrums.

What really sold her was the lower frustration factor, she said. One day she was walking her younger son, then about a year old, in a stroller around a pond when he started whining. He had something to say but he couldn't talk yet, so he used sign language instead.

He signed, ''Where are the ducks?" Magner said. And she answered -- with her hands -- that it was too cold for ducks and they were gone.

''Had I given him juice, he would have been livid, " she said. ''He had a question. We could sign to each other, then he was fine."

Lisa Kocian can be reached at 508-820-4231 or by e-mail at lkocian@globe.com.