Why did the speech-language pathologist ask about motor skills?
Why did the speech-language pathologist ask questions about motor development when assessing my child for speech and communication delays?
This was a question that a parent asked me last week and was the spark for creating a series of why taking a comprehensive and integrated approach is important when working with children and adults with diverse abilities.
Motor development does not necessarily cause language to emerge, but they are not completely unrelated. New motor skills can contribute to language development.
A. New motor skills give babies more opportunities to practice skills that are relevant to language development. For example:
Rhythmic hand and arm movements allow babies to practice rhythmically organized, tightly timed actions of the sort required for babbling. Studies show that these hand and arm movements emerge usually two or three weeks prior to “reduplicated babble” (e.g. mamama, bababa, dadadada) (e.g. Oller & Eilers, 1988).
Before children start to talk, they tend to take things apart (e.g. pulling nesting cups apart). With the advent of first words, putting things together becomes more frequent. Children also begin to put objects together in different ways (e.g. putting a bead inside a nesting cup). As a child’s vocabulary grows, children tend to make use of specific features of objects (e.g. putting a bead on a string, rather than putting it in a nesting cup). This may reflect advances in cognition that underpins both motor and language advances. But it may also suggest that, as a child develops motor skills, children are presented with more opportunities to notice specific features of the things they play with, e.g. that a string fits into the hole in a bead. As they make use of these features, they give specific meanings to objects – an important skill underpinning language.
First words are often tightly bound to action. Children are highly likely to name objects as they act on them (e.g. Rodgon et al, 1977). Children’s early words tend to refer to small, easily manipulated objects (e.g. Bates et al, 1979). Between 9 months and 12 months of age, children start to use “recognitory gestures” (e.g. putting a toy phone receiver to his/her ear, or putting an empty cup to his/her lips) and first words at around the same time. This suggests that naming (in gestures and in words) may be born in motor action.
B. New motor skills change the way babies interact with objects like toys, other people and their own bodies in ways that are relevant to language development. For example:
When a child is able to sit up on her own, she discovers new possibilities for vocal production. She can make more sounds because sitting up increases lung capacity, and repositions the main “articulators” particularly the lower jaw and tongue, which are both relevant to consonant-vowel combinations (e.g. MacNeilage & Davis, 2000). Speech patterns thus become more complex; and more like adult speech, e.g. more word-like utterances and several utterances within a single breathe group (e.g. Tingling, 1981).
Between 6 and 9 months of age, children tend to explore objects by putting them in their mouths. This period coincides with when children start producing consonants (which require a degree of vocal tract closure). “Mouthing” objects may thus help children to learn different postures with their teeth, lips, tongue relevant to producing new speech sounds (Ragan & Iverson, 2007).
When a child starts to crawl, they are more likely to encounter danger (e.g. things they can swallow or fall down/off). Parents respond to this by communicating more – often loudly and with feeling – to try to protect their child. Children thus gain experience attending to people and things located at a distance, e.g. by turning to look at a parent as the parent gestures toward the stairs, then looking at the stairs and back at the parent (e.g. Campos et al, 2000).
Studies show that, at 13 months of age, walkers carry objects more frequently that crawlers. They are also more likely to share objects by moving to their mothers and holding the object out for inspection (Karasik et al al, 2011). Walking provides walkers with more opportunity than crawling to access things that are far away, to use their hands to carry objects, and to see and locate objects and people in their surroundings. Infants are more likely to learn words when their attention is already focused on what they are ‘naming’ (Tomasello & Farrar, 1986). Retrieving and sharing objects with parents may thus provide rich opportunities for a walking child to learn language.
We want to be clear that language development can still happen even with motor delays, but working with your child or student on motor skill development can support language development.