ReviewWiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science2022
Developing language in a developing body, revisited: The cascading effects of motor development on the acquisition of language.
Review in Wiley interdisciplinary reviews. Cognitive science, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 37 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
37 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Examining the Transition from Single Words to Phrase Speech in Children with ASD: A Systematic Review.Clinical child and family psychology review · 2024Pooled it
- Developmental Trajectories of Emotional Availability Differ Between Dyads With Children With and Without Motor Delay.Infancy : the official journal of the International Society on Infant StudiesTrial
- Article
- Cognitive and Motor Development in Autistic Children: A Multi-Modal Feasibility Study Combining Neuroimaging and Virtual Reality Paradigms.Brain sciences · 2026Article
- Infants' Sleep Supports the Emergence and Mastery of Locomotor and Linguistic Skills.Developmental psychobiology · 2026Article
- Body position classification using wearable sensors in infants with cerebral palsy.Infant behavior & development · 2026Article
- Developmental Trajectories of Locomotor Skills in Infants With Down Syndrome.Pediatric physical therapy : the official publication of the Section on Pediatrics of the American Physical Therapy Association · 2026Observational
- Longitudinal speech and gross motor function development in children and adolescents with cerebral palsy.Developmental medicine and child neurology · 2026Article
- Moving, Seeing, Hearing, Smelling and Tasting: How Sensory-Motor Experiences Shape Early Cognitive Development.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Social communication development in a contingent world: insights from autism.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- Article
- Developing language in a developing body: genetic associations of infant gross motor behaviour and self-care/symbolic actions with emerging language abilities.Journal of child psychology and psychiatry, and allied disciplines · 2026Article
- Individual Differences in Infants' Curiosity Are Linked to Cognitive Capacity in Early Childhood.Developmental science · 2026Article
- Speech Perception and Preparation Are Supported by Distinct Neural Dynamics Across Development.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Article
- Swearing as a catalyst of technological development.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Vocalisations are coupled with movement of all limbs throughout infancy.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Developmental Language Disorder as a Multidimensional Neurodevelopmental Spectrum: Implications for Diagnosis.Journal of speech, language, and hearing research : JSLHR · 2025Review
- Early gross motor performance is associated with concurrent prelinguistic and social development.Pediatric research · 2025Article
- Infant manipulation complexity trajectories as predictors of language outcomes at 2 years of age.Infant behavior & development · 2025Article
- Moment-to-moment cascades: Infants' real-time locomotor posture structures opportunities for joint object play with caregivers.Developmental psychology · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
In the first years of life, infants rapidly acquire a series of new motor skills. They learn to sit independently, to walk with skill, and to engage in a wide variety of interactions with objects. Over these same years, infants also begin to develop language. These are not isolated events. In a complex developing system, even small changes in one domain can have far-reaching effects on development in other domains. This is the fundamental idea behind the rich framework known as the developmental cascades perspective. Here we employ this framework to show how early motor advances can exert downstream effects on the development of language. Focusing first on the emergence of independent sitting, then on the development of walking, and finally on changes in the ways in which infants act on and combine actions on objects, we describe how the nature and quality of infant actions change dramatically over the first few years and how this brings with it new possibilities for engaging the environment, more sophisticated ways of interacting with people, and significant alterations in communications directed by caregivers to the infant and coordinated with infant action in time and in meaning. The developmental cascades framework provides an approach for understanding how advances in motor skills influence communicative and language development, and more generally, for conceptualizing the constant, dynamic, and complex interplay between developing infants and their environments as it unfolds over time. This article is categorized under: Linguistics > Language Acquisition Psychology > Motor Skill and Performance Psychology > Development and Aging.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.