Low-income fathers’ and mothers’ parenting practices on infant locomotion and consequent language development: A longitudinal study from 9 to 24 months

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Project Summary Low-income fathers’ and mothers’ parenting practices on infant locomotion and consequent language development: A longitudinal study from 9 to 24 months Locomotion such as crawling and walking during infancy is associated with an array of psychological functioning including visual proprioception, joint attention, manual search for hidden objects, attachment to others. The robustness of the association between infant locomotion and skills development has been demonstrated in a variety of research paradigms, including randomized controlled trials. More recently, researchers found that the onset of walking is associated with an increase in vocabulary, independent of the age at which walking begins. This relation has been replicated in cross sectional, cross-linguistic and retrospective survey studies. However, why walking benefits early language development remains an open empirical question. Other than some insightful speculations from studies with autistic children and case studies using LENA recordings, we know little about the mechanisms that link the onset of walking to language skill development. Moreover, research in this area is almost exclusively based on infants from middle-class backgrounds in laboratory settings and include only mothers. The variation in the onset of walking as well as its links with language development is unexplored among infants in low-income families whose locomotive experiences might be different from their wealthier peers due to less space and access to resources. Because low-income children are at risk for a host of negative outcomes such as delays in language development, it is important to examine the links between infant walking and language skills, as it has been shown with middle class children. To address these questions, we examine: (1) the variation of major motor milestones in a sample of low-income children, and the specific associations between fathers’ and mothers’ physical support of walking during play at 9 months and the later acquisition of walking as reported by parents; (2) the proximal and distal associations between infant walking and language skills at 18 and 24 months; and (3) possible mechanism underlying the walking and language association, mediated by parental language input, infant gesturing and object manipulation, when controlling for key background factors. We propose to develop coding schemes to assess both fathers’ and mothers’ physical support of walking during play, infant gesturing and object manipulation, transcribe parent-child interactions, and analyze the direct and indirect effects between walking and language growth in a sample of 200 low-income fathers and mothers and their children. Data are drawn from an ongoing NICHD-funded longitudinal project that includes an ethnically diverse sample of English- and Spanish-speaking parents. This research will support early intervention programs to identify specific mechanisms associated with long-term deficits in academic outcomes of children from disadvantaged backgrounds, as well as hone interventions that result in more effective and sustained positive outcomes.