Developing language in a developing body: the relationship between motor development and language development

By Jana M. Iverson. Journal of Child Language, 2010

768 citations recorded by the source corpus.

During the first eighteen months of life, infants acquire and refine a whole set of new motor skills that significantly change the ways in which the body moves in and interacts with the environment. In this review article, I argue that motor acquisitions provide infants with an opportunity to practice skills relevant to language acquisition before they are needed for that purpose; and that the emergence of new motor skills changes infants’ experience with objects and people in ways that are relevant for both general communicative development and the acquisition of language. Implications of this perspective for current views of co-occurring language and motor impairments and for methodology in the field of child language research are also considered.

Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b05033ac77e8274c46d732cf550bd472739c9b4f

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In Developmental and Educational Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Sensorimotor intentionality: The origins of intentionality in prospective agent action (2013, positive): “…body of literature that attends to the importance of pre-conceptual goal-directedness for learning and development (Adolf et al., 2010; Frye, 1991; Hobson, 2002; Iversen, 2010; Reddy, 2008; Sheets-Johnstone, 2011; Stern, 2010; Stewart et al., 2011; Thelen, 1989; Trevarthen & Delafield-Butt, 2013a).”
Measuring early childhood development at a global scale: Evidence from the Caregiver-Reported Early Development Instruments (2018, background): “…importance of otor development in infancy, as these foundational skills enable hildren to explore their environments and acquire progressively ore advanced skills in problem solving, communication, and ocial interaction (Bushnell & Boudreau, 1993; Iverson, 2010; Piek, awson, Smith, & Gasson, 2008).”
Social Robots for Language Learning: A Review (2018, background): “First, they allow the learner to interact with the real-life physical environment, which is thought to be important for language development (Barsalou, 2008; Hockema & Smith, 2009; Iverson, 2010; Wellsby & Pexman, 2014).”
What are Fundamental Motor Skills and What is Fundamental About Them? (2020, background): “Indeed, speech can be viewed as a very elaborate and fundamental motor skill with theoretical positions in concert with those of motor development (e.g., Iverson, 2010; Luzzini-Seigel, Hogan, Rong, & Green, 2015).”
Where language meets attention: How contingent interactions promote learning (2021, background): “Infants with motor impairments may have limited abilities to access, manipulate, and share objects with others, and so their active role in establishing contingency may be altered (Iverson, 2010).”
The road to walking: What learning to walk tells us about development (2013, background): “New forms of communicative exchanges may facilitate joint attention to objects and new appreciation for others’ agency (Iverson, 2010).”