Exploring Connections between Maternal Speech and Infants' Use of Fine Motor Skills

Abstract

During infancy, consistent exposure to frequent, responsive speech is fundamental for optimal language development to occur, but there is a great amount of variability in the language that infants hear across the first years of life. Because it is important to understand the ways that language may be influenced in the developing child’s environment, the goal of the current study is to explore whether connections may exist between the fine motor skills (FMS) an infant is using and the maternal speech they hear simultaneously. To examine this question, naturalistic video recordings of snacks or meals from 29 infants’ homes were coded to analyze the concurrent maternal speech and infant object manipulation. Our results revealed no linear relationship between FMS and maternal speech, but several characteristics of object manipulation suggest that mothers speak fewer words while their infants use complex FMS compared to when they engage in less complex hand movements. From this study, we aimed to learn more about the ways in which maternal speech varies within infants’ everyday experiences, and these findings led us to a better understanding of how motor skills and language exposure may be related to each other over the course of early childhood development.