Developing language in a developing body, revisited: The cascading effects of motor development on the acquisition of language

Abstract

In the first years of life, infants rapidly acquire a series of new motor skills. They learn to sit independently, to walk with skill, and to engage in a wide variety of interactions with objects. Over these same years, infants also begin to develop language. These are not isolated events. In a complex developing system, even small changes in one domain can have far-reaching effects on development in other domains. This is the fundamental idea behind the rich framework known as the developmental cascades perspective. Here we employ this framework to show how early motor advances can exert downstream effects on the development of language. Focusing first on the emergence of independent sitting, then on the development of walking, and finally on changes in the ways in which infants act on and combine actions on objects, we describe how the nature and quality of infant actions change dramatically over the first few years and how this brings with it new possibilities for engaging the environment, more sophisticated ways of interacting with people, and significant alterations in communications directed by caregivers to the infant and coordinated with infant action in time and in meaning. The developmental cascades framework provides an approach for understanding how advances in motor skills influence communicative and language development, and more generally, for conceptualizing the constant, dynamic, and complex interplay between developing infants and their environments as it unfolds over time. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Motor Skill and Performance Psychology > Development and Aging.

Keywords: developmental cascades; infancy; language development; motor development.

Figure 1.

The onset of independent sitting influences the nature of infant vocalization, enhances opportunities for object manipulation, and leads to new configurations of the dyadic play space especially effective for creating moments of joint infant /caregiver attention to and caregiver communication about objects to which the infant is attending. These moments provide valuable opportunities for the infant to learn about objects and the words that refer to them.

Figure 2.

The emergence of walking allows infants to travel greater distances, expand their view of the environment, and carry objects from place to place. Walking infants make increased use of adult-directed communication, often combining it with object carrying to produce moving bids in which they show an object to a caregiver while walking toward them. Greater access to objects and more advanced and directed infant communication elicit caregiver input infused with labels for the objects being held and the actions being performed on them by the infants. These in turn provide optimal conditions for infant language learning.

Figure 3.

Developing infants act on objects and combine actions on objects in progressively more complex and varied ways. Through the consequences of their actions, they come to notice, attend to, and learn about an increasing variety of object properties, properties that constitute the meanings of things. As caregivers respond to these shifts in infant behavior by increasingly naming objects and the actions being performed by infants, caregiver language and infant meanings are tightly linked in time in ways that create powerful and predictable cues for language learning.