Infant Walking Shapes Language and Gesture Input from Caregivers

• In Event: Dynamics of the dyad: Reciprocal relations between infant action and caregiver input

Abstract

The acquisition of new motor skills expands infants’ opportunities for interactions with the objects and people in everyday life. Recently, researchers have turned their attention to understanding these processes as infants transition from crawling to walking, documenting changes in infants’ locomotor skills and in their engagements with caregivers. Findings from this work revealed that the transition to walking is related to concurrent changes in infants’ other abilities—better ways to move, see the world, and engage in social interactions with caregivers. Does the acquisition of walking similarly shape caregiver communication?

Thirty infants and their caregivers were videotaped in the home during everyday activities for approximately 45 minutes. Caregivers were asked to continue activities of their daily routines. We centered each infant’s observational window around the onset of walking (5 steps; M = 11.98 months, SD = 1.31) and coded the 2-month window around that midpoint.

For each session, we first identified all bouts of crawling, cruising, supported walking, and independent walking. We then coded caregiver communication in the window spanning 5 s before infants initiated a bout of locomotion until the end of each bout. Caregiver language and gestures were identified and categorized at the utterance-level as action verbs that directly requested locomotion (e.g., go, get) or object talk that provided referential information about objects (‘That’s your blue crayon’); and as movement gestures that directly requested locomotion (e.g., beckoning with outstretched arms) or show gestures in which caregivers held up an object in their infant’s view.

Data on the temporal coordination between infant locomotion and caregiver communication showed that infants’ real-time locomotor posture and the developmental transition to walking shaped rates of caregiver language input (see Figures 1A-C). Across the observation period, infants were twice as likely to hear language when they moved while upright (cruising, supported walking, independent walking) compared to when they crawled (Figure 1A). However, only walking differentially elicited types of caregiver talk—compared to crawling, action verbs were 2-3 times as likely to co-occur with bouts of walking (Figure 1B) and object talk was nearly three times as likely to co-occur with walking (Figure 1C), all ps < .05.

Similarly, the transition to walking shaped rates of gesture input from caregivers (see Figures 2A-C). Not only were bouts of walking generally more likely to co-occur with caregiver gestures (Figure 2A), but infants’ walking bouts were also more likely to co-occur with movement gestures (Figure 2B) and show gestures (Figure 2C), all ps < .05. Importantly, there were no differences when we compared crawling with cruising or supported walking on any measure of gesture.

Taken together, these results indicate that the transition to walking triggers dramatic changes in the language and gesture input that caregivers produce, providing robust evidence for the presence of a developmental cascade. Findings will be discussed on two timescales: (1) in the moment-to-moment relations between infant action and caregiver input and (2) in developmental time across the motor transition to illustrate caregivers’ sensitivity to their infants’ developing skills.

Authors

• Joshua L Schneider, University of Pittsburgh
  Presenting Author

• Jana M Iverson, Boston University
  Non-Presenting Author