Poster #160 - Investigating the Social Contexts of Learning to Walk

• In Event: 3-003 - Poster Session 09
  In Poster Session: PS 09 Section - Perceptual, Sensory, Motor

Integrative Statement

From their very first steps, infants interact with the world through social exchanges with caregivers. With language and gesture, parents encourage their infants to move, provide information about proximal and distal destinations, and structure opportunities to practice motor skills. Although researchers have long recognized that motor development happens in social worlds filled with caregivers who talk and move their hands (e.g., Adolph & Hoch, in press), few studies have measured how these interactions relate to infants’ everyday locomotor exploration while they are learning to walk.

To address this issue, we examined caregivers’ contingent communicative input—language and gesture—to their infants’ locomotor travels during natural play in the home. We observed 30 infant-caregiver dyads for approximately 45 minutes (SD = 4.73) during three occasions: 2 months before infants began to walk, at walk onset, and 2 months later.

For all bouts of infant locomotion with at least 4 steps (e.g., Karasik et al., 2012), we assessed caregiver communication in two ways. First, we coded language and gesture during the window of 5 s before infants began to move until the end of the bout. Second, we analyzed the temporal structure of caregivers’ messages by splitting the larger window into two; the first during the 5 s just before infants began to move and the second concurrent with the bout of locomotion.

Across the observation period, infants moved more, initiating significantly more bouts of locomotion at each session (Ms = 25.50, 37.50, and 83.75, p < .05). Infants’ travels did not go unnoticed. Preliminary findings show that caregivers provided input on approximately 60% of bouts and increased in their communicative scaffolding over time (Ms = 48.62%, 61.04%, and 70.94% at each of the 3 sessions respectively). Caregivers used language more frequently than gesture at each session (Ms = 47.33% vs 1.72%, 57.95% vs 11.72%, and 66.99% vs 12.77%, respectively) and both increased over time.

When partitioning the larger window to assess temporal contingencies between social input and infant locomotion (i.e., whether communication preceded or co-occurred with locomotion), preliminary results across the three sessions revealed that the proportion of language decreased (Ms = 31.09%, 28.50%, and 27.62%) but gesture increased (Ms = 0.86%, 5.49%, and 4.48%) before infants started to move. However, there was a significant increase both in the proportion of language (Ms = 16.24%, 29.45%, and 39.38%, p < .05) and gesture (Ms = 0.86%, 6.23%, and 8.30%, p < .05) input to infants while they were already on the go.

These data underscore the complexity with which the external social environment might interact with infant motor skill development. Caregivers’ communicative input to their infants’ locomotor pursuits during everyday play may potentially enhance exploration and provide new opportunities to practice existing skills and acquire new ones. Thus, we propose that a more dynamic view—one that takes social context into account—will provide a deeper understanding of how infants explore the environment via locomotion and learn new motor skills like walking.

Authors

• Joshua L. Schneider, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Ellora Mohanty, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author

• Jana M Iverson, University of Pittsburgh
  Non-Presenting Author