| Popis: |
Previous research suggests there is a positive correlation between infants’ motor and language development. Several reasons for this effect have been suggested, but little empirical research directly addressed them. Here we test the hypothesis that motor development is related to an increase in language-promoting interactions with parents (such as naming objects that the infant is interested in), that these activities are related to language development, and that they partly mediate the effect of motor development on language development. 93 parents from Israel filled in questionnaires about their 8- to-18-month-old infants’ language and motor development, as well as about their engagement in language-promoting interactions. We found that motor development was related to language-promoting interactions, and that language-promoting interactions were related to vocabulary size. The effect of motor development on vocabulary size was partly mediated by language-promoting interactions. |
