Examining the relation between motor skills and emerging language abilities in infancy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
PURPOSE: There is a growing body of research, supported by the discussion of developmental cascades, that indicates that communication and motor development are inextricably linked. Previous studies have demonstrated that the acquisition of certain motor milestones (i.e., sitting, walking, reaching) are associated with an infant’s subsequent emerging language abilities, however these studies often relied solely on parental reports due to the challenging nature of assessing prelinguistic infants' language abilities. Building on previous work that has established longitudinal links between specific gross motor milestones at 6 months and indicators of children's subsequent language at 10-14 months (Libertus & Violi, 2016), the present study aimed to extend this work by investigating objective measures of motor skills and their relation to an infant’s measures of expressive and receptive language at later time points using more nuanced, sensitive, and objective measures. METHODS: 24 typically developing infants and their demographic, motor, speech, and language data were selected from a larger longitudinal study in collaboration with researchers at the University of Pittsburgh. The infant’s motor and language abilities were assessed at different time points using parent reports, standardized measures, and fine-grained analysis of infant vocalization. RESULTS: Gross motor skills (as indicated by the Alberta Infant Motor Scale) at 6 months were found to have a significant positive correlation with receptive language abilities at 12 months. In turn, language as indicated by number of vocalizations but not motor skills at 12 months was found to significantly contribute to the prediction of expressive language abilities at 24 months. CONCLUSION: These results suggest that an infant’s early motor skills may play a role in subsequent language development through interactions that support the notion of developmental cascades. These results support previous findings linking motor skills and emerging language development as well as extend this relationship in typically developing infants using objective measures of motor and language abilities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".