An overlooked milestone : is age of sitting foundational in predicting age of onset of proto-declarative pointing?
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Date
2013-04-16
Authors
Lall, Debra I. K.
Eaton, Warren O.
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Abstract
Infant pointing to engage another’s attention demonstrates social understanding and predicts later language accomplishments. Crawling onset is thought to predict such pointing because self-locomotion facilitates perspective taking and self-initiated social engagement. Early crawlers point more than age-matched late crawlers, but this evidence for the role of self-locomotion is weakened by broad age-matching. Co-variation in the ages of onset for both crawling and pointing could also be due to shared underlying gross motor development. If locomotion is the active predictive ingredient in the crawl-point relation, the predictive potency of crawling should be largely independent of prior non-locomotor sitting onset. Longitudinally extracted ages of onset for sitting, crawling, and pointing were available for 312 infants. 30% of them did not show the expected sit-crawl-sequence, which rules out crawling as a necessary prerequisite for pointing. For the remaining 258 babies, crawling remained a significant predictor of pointing even after sitting, which was a weaker predictor, was accounted for. Self-locomotion may be important for the development of pointing, but it isn’t the sole active ingredient.
Description
Poster presented at the Biennial Meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development, April 19, 2013, Seattle, Washington, USA. Address correspondence to debralall@me.com or Warren.Eaton@ad.umanitoba.ca.
Keywords
infant milestones, pointing, crawling, sitting, self-locomotion, parent report