relationship between speech and language

What Is the Relationship Between Human Thought and Language?

Human consciousness is structured by "inner speech" which makes it conceptual..

Posted June 5, 2021 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

Unlike other species, our human language capacity shapes our inner thought processes in ways that we can begin to study and understand.
Inner speech differs from outer speech in being much more rapid, and far more fluid in meaning, than the speech we use in conversation.
Human consciousness is also influenced by the fact we interact with the world around us through tools, and these change with each generation.
The key to understanding human consciousness is language, but that still leaves the question of how consciousness manifests itself in the brain.

Previously, I mentioned what David Chalmers has called the "hard problem of consciousness," meaning the difficulty of explaining human consciousness in objective, scientific terms because of the impossibility of "getting inside" the head of another person and observing their thought processes. In fact, we face a problem in trying even to get inside our own heads—in that the moment we try and explain what our innermost thoughts are, we are already potentially changing them. An early pioneer of psychology, William James, likened this problem to "trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks."

Yet I believe we can gain important insights into both our own and other people’s thought processes because of what I have said previously about two unique aspects of human beings—our ability to design and use tools, and our capacity for language. And I would argue that our language capacity, in particular, shapes our thought processes in ways that we can begin to study and understand.

Two philosophers of mind who played a particularly important role in this respect were Lev Vygotsky and Valentin Voloshinov, who worked in Russia in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Vygotsky’s ideas were shaped particularly by his studies of the development of conscious awareness and conceptual thinking in children, while Voloshinov was more concerned with how consciousness manifests itself in the adult human brain.

Vygotsky believed that in children, "egocentric speech"—children’s tendency to talk to themselves as they play—is the first stage in a child starting to organise their actions using words, and subsequently, this form of speech becomes internalised as "inner speech," which structures our thoughts as adults. So by studying egocentric speech, it is possible to gain insights into the particular character of inner speech. In contrast, Voloshinov sought to understand inner speech by studying outer speech, and then extrapolating to the likely character of the inner speech from which our outer speech originates in the brain.

These studies combined suggested that inner speech differs from outer speech in some important ways. It is likely to be much more rapid, and far more fluid in meaning, than the speech we use in conversation with others. And there are also probably different types of inner speech, stretching from that which emerges from our innermost, half-formed thoughts, to that which structures our outer speech when we express ourselves to others.

One consequence of human inner consciousness being structured by language is that this gives a particular social dimension to it that is lacking in other species. And given that our inner speech not only reflects our present circumstances, but also the memory of past ones, our inner consciousness must be deeply infused with the past social interactions that we have had with other people—for instance, parents, siblings, teachers, friends, and colleagues.

Another distinctive feature of our species is that we interact with the world around us through tools. Importantly, these change with each new generation, and this is likely to have a significant impact on individual consciousness. One has only to think of how the invention of reading and writing must have affected human thought processes, or how the internet and social media have more recently affected human interactions, to see how profoundly such technological innovations may have influenced the workings of the inner human psyche.

Particularly relevant to how the internet may be affecting individual human consciousnesses is the fact that it is not only based around the written word, but also images, videos, and music. In fact, Vygotsky was clear that not only spoken language, but also what he called "cultural tools," which could include music, art, literature, and mathematical symbols, were all distinctive to humanity, and could each influence human consciousness.

If language and other "cultural tools" are central to structuring our inner consciousness, where does this leave thought? Given that human brains have much in common with those of other mammals, particularly other primates—at the most basic molecular and cellular levels, but also in terms of the different brain regions and their interconnections—it seems likely that at the most basic level of thought processes, we may also share much in common with some other species.

relationship between speech and language

Yet the lack of language in other species surely must have a profound impact on their inner consciousness. I said previously that language differs from animal communication in being an interconnected system of abstract symbols linked together by grammar. Now lacking such a system, there is no way that the inner consciousness of any other species can have that conceptual underpinning. And as a consequence, this means that no other species can have concepts of time and space, self and other, or indeed any of the abstract meanings by which we interpret the world around us, other people, and ultimately, our own selves.

None of this is to say that other species can’t have very sophisticated behaviours, feelings, and social interactions. But it does mean that they must lack any sense of a unified sense of self and their place in the world as we do. And to return to something I have mentioned previously: Thomas Nagel’s essay "What is it Like to a Bat?" While Nagel intended this question to reveal the limits to how much we can ever know scientifically about the subjective character of consciousness, I believe this question to be a non-starter. For not only could we never know what it feels like to be a bat, but neither could a bat, at least in terms of being able to express or even be self-consciously aware of such a feeling.

The key then to understanding human consciousness is language, but that still leaves the question of how that consciousness manifests itself in the brain, in terms of molecular and cellular signals, activities in different brain regions, and interconnections between those regions, and these are questions that I will explore in more detail later in this blog.

John Parrington, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in Molecular and Cellular Pharmacology at the University of Oxford, and a Tutorial Fellow in Medicine at Worcester College, Oxford.

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Language and culture.

Ee Lin Lee Ee Lin Lee Department of Communication Studies, Western Washington University
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.26
Published online: 07 July 2016

Language is an arbitrary and conventional symbolic resource situated within a cultural system. While it marks speakers’ different assumptions and worldviews, it also creates much tension in communication. Therefore, scholars have long sought to understand the role of language in human communication. Communication researchers, as well as those from other disciplines (e.g., linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and sociology), draw on each other’s works to study language and culture. The interdisciplinary nature of the works results in the use of various research methods and theoretical frameworks. Therefore, the main goal of this essay is to sketch the history and evolution of the study of language and culture in the communication discipline in the United States.

Due to space constraints only select works, particularly those that are considered landmarks in the field, are highlighted here. The fundamentals of language and the development of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis in leading to the formation of the language and social interaction (LSI) discipline are briefly described. The main areas of LSI study—namely language pragmatics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and the ethnography of communication—are summarized. Particular attention is paid to several influential theories and analytical frameworks: the speech act theory, Grice’s maxims of implicatures, politeness theory, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, the ethnography of speaking, speech codes theory, and cultural discourse analysis. Criticisms and debates about the trends and directions of the scholarship are also examined.

conversation analysis
discourse analysis
ethnography of speaking

The Fundamentals of Language

A major task of language researchers is to understand the complexities entailed in the structures of talk in order to unfold and understand sociality, including human nature, cultural values, power structure, social inequality, and so on. Researchers in language, culture, and communication study language situated in cultural nuances in order to understand language use in enhancing intergroup and intercultural dialogue. Although language enables learning and bonding, it also confuses interlocutors with contradictory yet deep and rich multi-layered meanings, such as (mis)interpretation of intentions, violation of normative conduct, and repair of conversations that have gone awry.

In a way, language not only construes our perception, but also constructs our social reality by manifesting actual social consequences. For example, the word race represents something that does not exist in physical reality, but it has real implications and consequences (e.g., discrimination, social disparity, unequal access to healthcare, etc.). Here, language allows the creation of actual and persistent perceptions (e.g., bad, inferior, non-deserving, and so on) that determine aspects of people’s lives. In fact, the role of language in influencing interlocutors’ perception and communication remains one of the most popular opening lines in empirical studies focusing on language and culture.

How Language Shapes Perception

Known as linguistic relativity, the notion that language influences our thinking about social issues derives from Edward Sapir’s works in anthropology and linguistics in the 1920s (Mandelbaum, 1963 ). Sapir studied the lexical dissections and categorization and grammatical features from the corpora obtained during his fieldwork over several decades. While studying the languages of different North American Indian tribes, including those living in Washington and Oregon in the U.S. and Vancouver in Canada, Sapir found, for example, that the Hopi language did not have lexical equivalents for the English words time, past , or the future . Therefore, he suggested that the Hopi worldview about temporal communication was different from the English worldview. In his lectures Sapir promoted the understanding of language as a system embedded in culture. Thereafter, based on Sapir’s findings, researchers studying language inferred that if there was no word for, say, you in a certain language, then speakers of that language treat you as nonexistent.

Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Sapir’s, later suggested that language could, to some extent, determine the nature of our thinking. Known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic determinism, the notion that language is a shaper of ideas or thought inspired further empirical testing (Whorf, 1952 ). This led some researchers to conclude that speakers of different languages (e.g., Polish, Chinese, Japanese, English, etc.) see their realities differently. The investigation of the effects of languages on human behaviors, as influenced by Sapir’s and Whorf’s works, continues to be a popular topic in various academic disciplines.

During its postwar rebuilding efforts overseas in the 1930s, the U.S. government recruited linguists and anthropologists to train its personnel at the Foreign Service Institute (FSI). While linguists researching the micro-level elements of languages successfully taught FSI officers how to speak different languages, anthropologists studying the macro-level components of culture (e.g., economy, government, religious, family practices, etc.) taught the officers how to communicate effectively with people from different cultures (Leeds-Hurwitz, 1990 ). The research and training collaboration between linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists at FSI showed that the learning of a foreign culture was not merely about acquiring language skills or translating from one language to another, but a holistic understanding of language in a wider context.

While the teaching of foreign languages to FSI officers was efficient, teaching anthropological understanding of foreign cultures was more challenging. Moreover, during the 1940s the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and the notion that language frames people’s worldview were contested in empirical findings. About the same time, Edward Twitchell Hall, who is credited with founding the field of intercultural communication, strongly promoted his belief that effective communication between two people from different cultural backgrounds (i.e., intercultural communication) should combine verbal (i.e., speech) and nonverbal (i.e., non-linguistic) communication embedded in a cultural context (Hall, 1966 ).

Citing efficiency, researchers at the time developed language translation programs that enabled the quick learning of intercultural communication. In this approach of linguistic universalism, researchers assumed structural equivalence across languages—that word-by-word translation can foster cultural understanding (Chomsky, 1972 ). This shift of direction in academic research challenged Sapir’s proposition of the understanding of culture and communication based on common conceptual systems—the notion that meanings and values of concepts cannot be truly understood without understanding the cultural system.

Regardless of the competing viewpoints, research on how speakers of different languages operate under different language and communication systems continues to date. Researchers have also widened the scope of the language and culture program to include the study of language use and functions (i.e., communicative purposes) in and across different cultural systems. Although the translation of the linguistic corpora into the English language is commonly featured in proprietary research publications, analyzing discourse data in the native languages is preferred. Language is therefore treated as intact with the cultural system. This line of study, despite differences in methodological and theoretical frameworks, forms the basis for a specific discipline within the communication field called language and social interaction (LSI).

The LSI discipline focuses on the study of human discourse and human interaction in situatedness. Scholars pursuing this line of research seek to understand the development of speech and language processes in various settings, from small group to interpersonal, including face-to-face and those mediated by technology (see International Communication Association [ICA] and National Communication Association websites, respectively). The scholarship employs qualitative and quantitative methods and includes verbal (i.e., speech) and nonverbal communication (i.e., nonlinguistic cues) (see the ICA website ). The various methodological and theoretical frameworks used include social psychology, ethnography of speaking, discourse analysis, conversation analysis, and narrative analysis. Although well-established and housed in the communication field, works in LSI are interdisciplinary.

While LSI studies also include nonverbal communication as a language system, scholarship on speech—whether naturally occurring, elicited, mediated, or written—outnumber those focusing on nonverbal communication. The paucity of nonverbal scholarship in the LSI discipline underscores the challenges of recording nonverbal communication for data analysis (Fitch & Sanders, 2005 ). Although studies pertaining to how social life is lived in situated conversation and language is used in various interactional settings dominate LSI research discourse, the study of nonverbal communication as language deserves its own coverage as a (sub)discipline. Consequently, this essay focuses on the scholarship on speech in LSI. The following sections review a selection of the LSI subdisciplines organized by research methods, or more commonly conceptualized as analytical frameworks and procedures: language pragmatics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and the ethnography of communication. The review highlights a few major theories or theoretical frameworks in each subdiscipline, namely the speech act theory, Grice’s maxims of implicatures, politeness theory, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, the ethnography of speaking, speech codes theory, and cultural discourse analysis.

Language Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of language usage or talk in interaction. Researchers who study language pragmatics investigate the meanings of utterances in relation to speech situations in the specific contexts of use. Two theoretical frameworks that are commonly cited in language pragmatics are the speech act theory and Grice’s maxims of conversational implicatures, from which the influential politeness theory derives. These theoretical frameworks emerged from the examination of language independently from context, including situational factors that influence the cultural assumptions of the speaker and hearer.

Speech Act Theory

In an attempt to understand utterances in interaction, Austin ( 1962 ) explained speech acts as communicative acts in which speakers perform actions via utterances in specific contexts. Called performatives , these are illocutionary acts in which the speaker asserts a demand through utterances. Illocutionary acts contain force— that is, they allow the speaker to perform an act without necessary naming the act (e.g., apology, question, offer, refuse, thank, etc.). Austin illustrated three types of force: (a) locution , the words in the utterances; (b) illocution , the intention of the speaker; and (c) perlocution , the consequential effects of the utterance upon the thoughts, feelings, or actions on the hearer.

The speaker’s illocutionary act is said to be happy when the hearer understands the locution and illocutionary forces. In order for the speaker’s illocutionary act to be happy, the utterance has to fulfill felicity conditions. Felicitous illocutionary acts are those that meet social and cultural criteria and bring about effects on the hearer that the speaker intended (Searle, 1969 ). Thus, illocutionary acts are conventionalized messages, because their performance is an engagement in rule-governed behavior (also see Goffman, 1967 ).

Searle extended Austin’s concept of speech acts and elaborated on the speech act theory by identifying the conditions necessary for the realization of speech acts. For example, to promise, the speaker needs sincerity and intentionality; to declare the marital union of two partners, a priest or a judge has to be present. Hence the successful performance of a speech act depends on whether the constituent conditions of a particular speech act are fulfilled, or a particular speech act is realized in a contextually appropriate manner (i.e., in relation to sociocultural factors).

Searle developed a typology to categorize speech acts: (a) representatives , where the speaker says how something is, like asserting; (b) directives , the speaker tries to get the hearer to perform some future action, such as requesting and warning; (c) commissives , the speaker commits to some future course of action, such as pledging and promising; (d) expressives , the speaker articulates his or her psychological state of mind about some prior action, such as apologizing and thanking; and (e) declaratives , performatives that require non-linguist institutions, such as christening or sentencing. These conditions must be fulfilled for the speaker to effect the specific act.

The speech act theory can be used to describe utterance sequences—for example, to predict antecedents and consequents in a conversation. Thus, when a violation of the typology occurred, speech act theory successfully predicted repairs and other signs of troubles in the conversational moves. However, Searle’s taxonomy was criticized for several reasons. First, while Searle treated illocutionary acts as consisting of complete sentences in grammatical form, such acts can be very short utterances that do not follow the complete object-verb-subject structure (e.g., “Forge on!”). On the other hand, the speaker may need to utter several sentences to bring about effects on the hearer (e.g., advising). Second, Searle assumed that the felicity conditions for successful performances are universal, but later studies found that the conditions are indeed specific to the culture.

Furthermore, Searle subscribed to a linear, speaker-to-hearer view of transaction that dismissed the interactional aspect of language. The hearer’s role was minimized; specifically, the hearer’s influence on the speaker’s construction of utterances was ignored. Searle also neglected perlocutionary acts, which focus on the intention of the speaker. Instead, he focused solely on the linguistic goal of deliberate expression of an intentional state while overlooking extralinguistic cues. In short, the speech act theory could not account for intentionality and variability in discourse.

Grice’s Maxims of Implicatures

By moving beyond the linear (i.e., speaker-to-hearer) view of transaction, Grice proposed the cooperative principle ( 1989 ). He observed that interlocutors engage in collaborative efforts in social interaction in order to attain a common goal. In Grice’s view, collaborative efforts do not mean agreement; they mean that the speaker and the hearer work together in the conversation. According to the principle, participants follow four conversational maxims: quantity (be informative), quality (be truthful), relation (be relevant), and manner (be clear, be brief). Since these four maxims vary by culture, the interlocutors need to have culturally nuanced knowledge to fulfill these maxims.

According to Grice, meaning is produced in a direct way when participants adhere to the maxims. When the speaker’s intentions are conveyed clearly, the hearer should not have to interpret the speaker’s intentions. This occurs with conventional implicatures where standard word meanings are used in the interaction. However, in actual social interaction, most meanings are implied through conversational implicatures in which one or more of the conversational maxims are violated. Due to normative constraints, a speaker who says p implicates q , and the hearer would then need to infer the implied meanings; for example, what is being said and what is beyond words in a recommendation letter.

In short, Grice’s maxims of conversational implicatures are used to explain why people engage in different interpretations rather than rely on the literal meanings of utterances. The maxims attend to implied meanings that constitute a huge part of conversation and also the role of the hearer. Nonetheless, the cooperative principle was criticized for privileging the conversational conventions of middle-class English speakers. Additionally, Grice did not scrutinize strategic non-cooperation, which remains a primary source of inference in conversation (Hadi, 2013 ).

Politeness Theory

Influenced by Grice’s maxims, Brown and Levinson ( 1987 ) proposed the politeness theory to explain the interlocutor’s observation of conversational implicatures in order to maintain the expressive order of interaction. Brown and Levinson observed politeness strategies that consistently occurred in their field data across several languages: Tzetzal and Tamil languages in Asia, and the British and American forms of English. Despite the distinctive cultures and languages, they observed outstanding parallelism in interlocutors’ use of polite language to accomplish conversational goals. Politeness is the activity performed to enhance, maintain, or protect face or the self-image of the interlocutors.

To illustrate language universality in politeness, Brown and Levinson proposed a socialized interlocutor—nicknamed a model person (MP)—as a face-bearing human with rationality and intentionality when communicating. To avoid breaching social equilibrium, the MP, whom Brown and Levinson identified as the speaker, conforms to social norms to be polite. In performing a speech act, the MP cultivates a desirable image (i.e., positive social worth), pays attention to the hearer’s responses, and ensures that nobody loses face in social interactions (e.g., feels embarrassed, humiliated, awkward, etc.).

Since face is emotionally invested (e.g., actors get upset) and sanctioned by social norms, actors are said to engage in rule-governed behavior to pay homage to their face. Due to the emotional investment, face threats are likely to occur when actors perform facework. Brown and Levinson described two basic face wants: positive face , the desire for one’s actions to be accepted by others, such as approval from others; and negative face , the desire for one’s actions to be unimpeded by others. A threat to positive face decreases approval from the hearer (e.g., acknowledging one’s vulnerability), whereas a threat to negative face restricts one’s freedom to act (e.g., requesting a favor).

According to the politeness theory, the speaker can choose whether or not to perform face-threatening acts (FTAs). When performing FTAs, the speaker will go on or off record. In going off record, the speaker uses hints or utterances that have more than one attributable intentions, so that he or she does not appear to have performed a speech act. For example, the speaker who utters “Oops, I don’t have any cash on me” to the hearer after they have dined together in a restaurant is using an off-record strategy to suggest that the hearer foot the bill. In contrast, going on record means that the speaker performs the FTA (i.e., baldly without saving face) with or without redress. With redress, the speaker indicates that he or she does not intend to violate social equilibrium by performing the FTA (see further discussion below). Without redress, the speaker directly expresses his or her desire; for instance, the speaker commands the hearer to pay for lunch by saying, “You should pay this time.”

The speaker can use either positive or negative politeness strategies when performing FTAs with redress. Positive politeness strategies are used to attend to the hearer’s positive face. For example, in the restaurant scenario, the speaker can choose to compliment the hearer in order to establish solidarity by saying, “You have always been so generous …” On the other hand, negative politeness strategies are used to avoid imposing on the hearer’s negative face. For example, by seeking permission, “Would you consider paying for lunch? I will return the favor in the future,” the speaker acknowledges that the hearer is not obligated to perform the action of footing the bill.

According to the politeness theory, the speaker wants to use the least amount of effort to maximize ends by considering the weight of performing the FTA. Brown and Levinson postulated a formula: Wx = P (S, H) + D (S, H) + R, where W stands for the weight of the FTA; P the relative power of hearer (H) over speaker (S), which is asymmetrical (e.g., if H is an authority); D the social distance between H and S, which is symmetrical (if H speaks another dialect); and R the ranking of imposition of the FTA in a particular culture. They suggested that P and D were universal with some emic correlates. Thus, in calculating Wx, S will consider the payoffs of each strategy. For example, in using positive politeness strategies, S may appear to be friendly, whereas in using an off-record strategy, S may appear manipulative by imposing on H, who gets S’s hints and then performs a future act. In using an on-record strategy, S may choose to be efficient, such as in an emergency (e.g., Ambush!).

After three decades, politeness theory remains one of the most tested theories. However, amongst its criticisms, the theory is said to account for intentional politeness, but not intentional impoliteness. The significant attention paid to the speaker’s utterances, albeit with a consideration for the hearer’s face, reveals the assumption of conversations as monologic. In some respects the theory followed the trajectory of Searle’s and Grice’s works in that the performance of utterances is conceptualized as a rational cognitive activity of the speakers. In particular, speakers are assumed to generate meanings and action, whereas hearers are treated as receivers who interpret the speech performance. Therefore, the politeness theory is unable to fully explain interactional organization in talk exchanges.

Conversation Analysis

During the 1960s, empirical science centered on the prediction of the effects of abstract ideas on communication and social life. Common predictors tested include personality types, cognition, biological sex, income level, and political stance. Social scientists who studied language commonly adhered to the quantitative paradigm; they conducted experiments, used elicited conversations, and analyzed responses containing rehearsals of recollected conversations. The study of mundane rituals, however, was not of academic concern.

Erving Goffman, a sociologist, later made a radical theoretical move that differed significantly from the mainstream empirical studies. Goffman stated that orderliness was empirically observable from everyday conversation. He argued that since socialization shapes the social actor’s competencies, conversation maintains moral codes and institutional order. In other words, sequential ordering of actions in social interaction reflects the macro social institution (e.g., politics, business, legal systems, etc.).

Goffman’s works were viewed as a paradigm shift in the social sciences. He called attention to the orderliness that is observable in ordinary conversation—an area of investigation that other scientists neglected. Furthermore, unlike the early works in language study, Goffman’s theoretical framework no longer focused solely on the performance of speakers in conversations. Instead, meaning making—that is, the examination of the participants’ understanding of one another’s conduct—took precedence. Goffman did not test his ideas, nor did he develop any set of empirical methods that allowed the testing of his ideas.

In search of an empirical analysis of conversation, Harold Garfinkel, another sociologist, expanded on Goffman’s ideas. Garfinkel ( 1967 ) proposed that ethno-methods (i.e., the study of people’s practices or methods) inform the production of culturally meaningful symbols and actions. He noted that social actors use multiple tacit methods (e.g., presuppositions, assumptions, and methods of inference) to make shared sense of their interaction. Thus, conversation is a place where participants engage in mundane reason analysis, and conversational sequential structure—the organization of social interaction—reveals membership categorization.

The subdiscipline of conversation analysis (CA) was further expanded when Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff, who were later joined by Gail Jefferson, studied suicide calls made to the Center for the Scientific Study of Suicide, Los Angeles (Sacks, 1984 ). They investigated how sequential structure is managed in institutional talk. Conversation analysts study conversation sequence organization, turn design, turn taking, lexical choices, the repair of difficulties in speech, and the overall conversational structure. They analyze linguistic mechanisms (e.g., grammar and syntax, lexis, intonation, prosody, etc.) in naturally occurring conversations.

Institutional talk, as examined in later CA studies, focused on those that have fewer formal constraints as institutional practices (e.g., phone calls, doctor–patient interaction, and classroom instructions), but not those that have rigid structures within formalized rituals (e.g., a religious wedding ceremony, a sermon, etc.). Institutional CA studies accelerated in the past few decades, allowing the identification of macro-level societal shifts through the management of social interaction in talk (Gee & Handford, 2012 ).

In general, CA theory postulates that talk is conducted in context. Participants’ talk and actions evoke context, and context is invoked and constructed by participants. Sequencing position in conversations reflects the participants’ understanding of the immediate preceding talk. As such, sequential structure reveals socially shared and structured procedures (Garfinkel, 1967 ). Thus, CA is the study of action, meaning, context management, and intersubjectivity.

CA is qualitative in methodology, even though later scholarship involved statistical analysis. The method is criticized for several weaknesses, among them: (a) the analysis and presentation of select segments of conversation lack rationale; (b) most CA studies are restricted to studying conversations in North America and Europe; (c) since multiple identities are at play in conversations, those that are consequential for social interaction remain ambiguous and debatable in analyses; and (d) the boundaries between pleasantries (e.g., small talk) and institutional talk are at times fuzzy in institutional CA (Have, 1990 ). Nevertheless, with a range of sub-areas quite well developed, CA is said to form its own discipline.

Discourse Analysis

Discourse Analysis (DA) is a broad term for different analytical approaches used to examine text and talk. Discourse is considered language use in general, and language is viewed as a form of action. The distinctions between the different approaches used in DA are based on the influences of the early works or traditions in conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis and critical linguistics, Bakhtinian research, Foucauldian research, and even interactional sociolinguistics (Gee & Handford, 2012 ). However, the very different approaches and practices in DA have sparked disagreements among researchers about their applications and distinctions.

Data used in DA range from written to spoken, such as recorded spontaneous conversation, news articles, historical documents, transcripts from counseling sessions, clinical talk, interviews, blogs, and the like. Socio-historical contexts are often included in DA. As a tool for analyzing text and talk, DA has significantly influenced the study of language and culture. Two of the most popular DA approaches used in communication studies are Discursive Psychology (DP) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA).

Discursive Psychology

DP evolved in the early 1990s from Derek Edwards and Jonathan Potter’s works, in which they expressed dissatisfaction with the ways psychologists treated discourse. In psychology, utterances are treated as a reflection of the speaker’s mental state. Hence, talk is considered reflective (Edwards & Potter, 2005 ). However, in DP talk is considered constructive; language use is thus viewed as a social action or function. This means that people use language to make sense of what they do in a socially meaningful world. Therefore, language is treated as a tool to get things done.

In DP, researchers study the details of what people say (e.g., descriptions, terms, lexicons, or grammar). Researchers are concerned with how these features have particular effects or bear functions, such as shifting blame, denying responsibility, and providing counterarguments. DP researchers seek to understand the interests, attitudes, and motives of the speakers, particularly, why people use language the way they do and how they manage and construct identities.

Language use in news media coverage provides a good example for DP analysis. For example, the August 2015 news coverage about corruption in Malaysian government offices supplies rich vocabularies for analyzing the speakers’ motives. Under the leadership of Bersih (an organization whose name literally translates to clean in the Malay language), an estimated half a million street demonstrators peacefully gathered in Kuala Lumpur, the country’s capital, for a public demonstration that lasted two days. The demonstrators demanded transparency in the country’s governance, including fair elections. They urged the Prime Minister, Najib Razak, to resign following a critical exposé published in The Wall Street Journal . The Prime Minister was reported to have transferred the equivalent of US$11 billion from a government development firm into his personal bank account (Wright & Clark, 2015 ). Prior to the Prime Minister’s counterattack, the press labeled the demonstrators rally goers . However, the Prime Minister and his acolytes in government in turn used descriptors such as criminals, crazy, unpatriotic , and shallow-minded culprits to label the demonstrators traitors to their country.

The description above shows the way the speakers used language to construct their reality and their relationship to that reality. In this case, DP researchers would analyze and illustrate how the Prime Minister and his government officials co-construct shared meanings in interaction, such as particular realities, beliefs, identities, or subjectivities. For instance, the government can be seen as attempting to exercise control over the public demonstrators (through discourse) in order to defend governmental power. Thus, by labeling the demonstrators culprits , the government asserted its identity as the authority— the elite power that runs the country and decides what goes.

DP researchers assume that each speaker has multiple identities, and the identities can only be performed successfully with the consent of the listeners (Antaki & Widdicombe, 1998 ). The researchers also assert that the productive examination of discourse must be considered within the context of language use, such as the institutional setting and local sequential organization of talk. For example, a proper analysis of the Malaysian public demonstration above must include an understanding of the context of the public demonstrators’ dissatisfaction with governmental corruption and citizen’s demand for transparency in governance—a longstanding issue since the country’s independence from Britain. Thus, indexicality—the understanding that the meaning of a word is dependent on the context of use—is essential in DP analysis (Potter, 1996 ).

Perhaps one of the strongest criticisms of DP is the researchers’ reluctance to interpret macro-social concerns. DP researchers insist that the analysis of text and talk should depend on the context exactly as construed by the language used. This means that extratextual information should not be inserted in the analysis. Therefore, DP cannot be utilized to interrogate broader social concerns, such as politics, ideology, and power (Parker, 2015 ). As such, context is limited to and constituted by the interactional setting and functions of utterances.

DP is also criticized for casting speakers as conscious and agentic—that is, as autonomous subjects who manipulate language to do things. Speakers’ intentionality in attribution is thus considered fixed in their minds. Such an assumption in fact closely resembles that of traditional psychology—the very idea that DP researchers attempted to shift away from (Parker, 2015 ). Moreover, the analyst’s interpretation is crucial in unfolding an understanding of the discourse. The analyst’s knowledge and statuses thus influence his or her interpretation of the language used by speaker and can be a weakness if the analyst may conform to some sort of ideology that impacts data interpretation.

Critical Discourse Analysis

Of all the approaches used to study DA, CDA is one that takes a macrosocietal and political standpoint (Van Dijk, 1993 ). Critical discourse analysts examine how societal power relations are enforced, legitimated, maintained, and dominated through the use of language. The sociohistorical context of the text is emphasized. The examination of social problems requires the analyst to be well versed in multiple disciplines. Commonly, the analysts are motivated by particular political agendas or ideologies, and they seek to challenge certain ideologies (Fairclough, 2005 ). Therefore, based on, say, the motivation to fight social inequality and oppression, an analyst may seek out selected texts or talks for study. It is in CDA studies that the abuse, dominance, and unequal distribution of social goods are called into question.

Social theorists whose works are commonly cited in CDA include Pierre Bourdieu, Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Karl Marx, Jürgen Habermas, and Michel Foucault. Typical vocabulary in CDA studies includes power, dominance, hegemony, class, gender, race, discrimination, institution, reproduction , and ideology . Topics examined include gender inequality, media discourse, political discourse, racism, ethnocentrism, nationalism, and antiSemitism. Critical discourse analysts seek to answer questions such as: How do elite groups control public discourse? How does such discourse control the less powerful group (in terms of mind and action)? What are the social consequences of such discourse control? (Van Dijk, 1993 ). The dominant social groups in politics, media, academics, and corporations are scrutinized in terms of the way they produce and maintain the dominant ideology.

Critical discourse analysts explore three contextual levels of discourse: the macro, meso, and micro (Van Dijk, 1993 ). At the macro level, analysts focus on the understanding of relationship between the text and broader social concerns and ideologies. At the meso level, analysts examine the contexts of production and reception of the text, and the ideologies portrayed. The analysts ask questions such as: Where did the text originate? Who is (are) the author(s) and the intended audience of the text? What perspectives are being promoted? At the micro level, analysts scrutinize the forms and contents of the text through linguistic features and devices in order to reveal the speaker’s perspective or ideology. Linguistic features and components studied include direct and indirect quotations, terms used to refer to individuals or groups, sentence structure and grammar (e.g., active and passive voice), and premodifiers (e.g., non-Muslim citizens or Muslim-Chinese citizens).

While analysts frequently favor institutional texts (e.g., a journalistic report) in their analyses, everyday conversation is also included. In fact, everyday conversation is considered social group discourse that can be used to reveal societal norms and shared beliefs. According to van Dijk’s studies of racism in everyday conversation, he found that the speakers’ utterances of “I am not racist, but …” and “We are not a racist society, but …” are in fact a reproduction of institutional talk. He called this specific type of talk a double strategy of positive self-representation and negative other-denigration.

While the multidisciplinary nature of CDA seems beneficial, it is also one of its biggest criticisms. In particular, critical discourse analysts are often accused of not productively using a combination of multiple approaches. Indeed, the more linguistically-oriented studies of text and talk overlooked theories in sociology and political sciences that focus on social and power inequality issues. On the other hand, those that focus on sociology and political sciences did not rigorously engage in DA. Moreover, the relationship between discourse and action coupled with cognition remains inconclusive (Van Dijk, 1998 ).

The Ethnography of Communication

The ethnography of communication originated from ethnology in the 1800s and found a home in in anthropology. Bronislaw Malinowski, a Polish anthropologist, pioneered the ethnographic methods. He intensively recorded the methods he used in his fieldwork when studying the Trobrian Islanders of Papua New Guinea in 1914 , including intrinsic details about the people, their language, and their daily life (Murdock, 1943 ). Franz Boas, a German anthropologist who lived among the Inuit in the late 1800s, further propounded on the necessity for language training among ethnographers who wished to decode the emic (i.e., native) perspective (Muller-Wille, Gieseking, & Barr, 2011 ).

Ethnographers study social norms, meanings, and patterns of life by examining symbolic activities ranging from speech to social artifacts. By writing on culture, recording people, and natural history, ethnographers describe, analyze, and compare people from different communities. The painstaking work involved in ethnography provides rich data that are highly nuanced. Ethnographic works are said to be the portraits of social life. Oftentimes, interviews are used concurrently, along with other methods (e.g., textual analysis) to obtain community members’ interpretation and explanation of the communicative activities. Data analyses are conducted along with (i.e., not after) data recording in the field.

While an ethnographer may generate questions for investigation before entering the field, he or she must remain flexible and receptive to other important questions that may emerge on site. The focus of investigation might shift because theoretical sensitivity—the review of literature prior to fieldwork—may not sufficiently orient the ethnographer to actual interactions. This is because the behaviors and activities that the ethnographer purports to study may have changed due to cultural shift. The use of such an inductive method allows the study of language and culture without theoretical constraints.

Ethnographers may compare the behaviors cross-culturally when a sufficient number of studies of the cultures of interest become available. Since the voices of community members are given precedence, ethnographic reports rely heavily on and present people’s utterances, as well as fine details of observations. In fact, early ethnographic works in anthropology tend to exhaustively cover many life aspects about a community, though the search for nuances and painstaking details, coupled with the ethnographer’s prolonged engagement in the community, pose constraints of time and resources. However, in the 1960s, ethnography took a new turn with the greater emphasis on the study of language use.

The Ethnography of Speaking

The prominence of ethnographic studies focusing on speech in language and culture began in the 1960s with Dell Hymes’s study of language use. Hymes, who was trained in anthropology and linguistics, sought to understand speech patterns, functions, and speaking in situatedness. He departed from microlinguistics (which focuses on semantics, turn-taking, prosody, and conversational structure) to pursue a more holistic account of interaction in context. Hymes emphasized the examination of nonverbal cues, tone of conversation, evaluation of the interlocutors’ conduct, the setting of the interaction, and so forth.

Speaking is considered fundamental in understanding social reality. Hymes’s ethnography of speaking (later called ethnography of communication) is a method for analyzing communication in different cultural settings. Hymes’s ( 1972 ) SPEAKING mnemonic or schema, developed as an etic framework for the etic understanding of social interaction, provides an inductive tool for examining social and cultural elements through the means and ways of speaking. Each letter in the SPEAKING mnemonic represents a different element of a speech act: S represents the setting or scene; P , the participants and participant identities; E , the ends; A , the act sequence and act topic; K , the key or tone; I , the instrumentalities; N , the norms of interaction and interpretation; and G , the genre.

The SPEAKING mnemonic is one of the most widely used theoretical and analytic frameworks in ethnographic studies. Although Hymes developed it to study spontaneous conversation, recent communication studies has broadened the scope of the data to include textual analysis and computer-mediated communication. Such pluralities are, in fact, inherent in people’s ways of speaking and despite some criticisms (e.g., Hymes proposed using his methods to study muted groups, but researchers who wish to listen to minority voices must also learn to listen to the dominant ones), the ethnography of speaking’s theoretical framework has withstood the test of time. It was the inspiration for Gerry Philipsen’s ( 1992 ) speech codes theory—another important heuristic theory in the ethnographic study of language and culture.

Speech Codes Theory

In addition to Hymes’ ethnography of speaking, Philipsen drew from Bernstein’s coding principle ( 1971 ) to postulate his speech codes theory. Bernstein argued that different social groups manifest different communicative practices and linguistic features. These differences are influenced by and, in turn, reinforce the groups’ coding principles—the rules that govern what to say and how to say it in the right context.

According to Philipsen, people’s ways of speaking are woven with speech codes—the system of symbols, meanings, premises, and rules about communication conduct that are historically situated and socially constructed. Therefore, examining a community’s discourse can tease out people’s understanding of the self, society, and strategic action. Philipsen posited five propositions for studying the relationship between communication and culture:

People in different speech communities exhibit different ways of speaking, with different rules for communicative conduct informed by their socially constructed symbols and meanings.

Each code gives practical knowledge about the ways of being in a speech community.

People attach different cultural meanings to speech practices.

Metacommunication (i.e., talk about talk) reveals important worldviews, norms, and values of the people.

The common speech code reveals the morality of communication conduct. For example, community members’ discourse about should not s reveal the should s that they value.

Using the five propositions, Philipsen argued that the speech codes theory can reveal the ways of speaking and reinforce a group’s speech codes. Indeed, the theory has informed the vibrant scholarship on ways of speaking and meaning-making across different global cultural communities. For example, Lee and Hall’s ( 2012 ) study of Chinese Malaysian discourse of dissatisfaction and complaint-making, with and without a formal goal of resolution—called, respectively, thou soo and aih auan— unearthed previously unexplored cultural values of the speech community. Lee ( 2014 ) developed the study further to understand the assumptions of personhood among Chinese Malaysians.

Cultural Discourse Analysis

The speech codes theory also served as the foundation for the development of Donal Carbaugh’s cultural discourse analysis theory. Carbaugh, a former student of Philipsen’s, proposed the cultural discourse theory (CDT) as a way to understand culturally shaped communication practices. According to CDT, cultural discourses are constituted by cultural communication and codes. Culture is an integral part but also a product of communication practices that are highly nuanced and deeply meaningful and intelligible to cultural participants (Carbaugh, 1996 ). Cultural participants draw on diverse communication practices and thus create diversity within and across cultural communities.

Cultural discourse analysts study key cultural terms that are deeply meaningful to the participants; for example, oplakvane , which is a distinctive way of speaking to assert Bulgarian personhood (Carbaugh, Lie, Locmele, & Sotirova, 2012 ). Such cultural terms are an ongoing metacultural commentary that reveals implicit cultural knowledge, the taken-for-granted knowledge, such as beliefs, values, and assumptions about the self.

Three types of questions typically guide cultural discourse analysis (CuDA) are: (a) functional accomplishment (What is getting done when people communicate in this specific way?); (b) structure (How is this communicative practice conducted? What key cultural terms are used to give meaning to the participants? What deep meanings do the terms create?); and (c) sequencing or form (What is the act sequence of this communicative practice, in terms of interactional accomplishments, structural features, and sequential organization?).

The analyst approaches a CuDA project with a particular stance or mode of inquiry. Carbaugh identified five modes of inquiry that enable analysts to tease out important cultural ingredients in a topic of investigation: the theoretical, descriptive, interpretive, comparative, and critical. For example, the theoretical mode enables analysts to understand the basic communication phenomena in the speech codes of a community and therefore to refine what and how to listen for culture in their discourse before venturing into the field. The five modes chart a rough linear design; the analyst must accomplish the preceding mode before embarking on the subsequent mode. The first three modes (i.e., theoretical, descriptive, and interpretive) are mandatory in any CuDA project; however, the last two (i.e., comparative and critical) may or may not be accomplished in a single study (e.g., in an exploratory study).

Cultural discourse analysts typically use Hymes’s SPEAKING framework and Philipsen’s speech codes theory as guidelines for their subsequent analyses in the descriptive and interpretive stages. The analysis of implicit cultural meanings in CuDA can be structured using five semantic radiants or hubs: being , acting , relating , feeling , and dwelling . Using CuDA, analysts can tease out people’s understanding of who they are (being); what they are doing together (acting); how they are linked to one another (relating); their feelings about people, actions, and things (feeling); and their relationship to the world around them (dwelling). The cultural discourse analyst’s task, then, is to advance cultural propositions (i.e., statements containing the taken-for-granted knowledge) and premises (i.e., values or beliefs). These are statements that shed light on the importance of a particular communicative practice among members of a speech community (e.g., beliefs about what exists, what is proper, or what is valued).

While the theories in the ethnography of communication have gained a lot of prominence in the LSI discipline, they have also enriched it. For example, Hymes’s SPEAKING framework, Philipsen’s speech codes theory, and Carbaugh’s CDT have all added depth and rigor to LSI data analysis. Evidently, to navigate through the language and social interactions of a community to which the researcher is not an insider, he or she needs to gain communicative competence (Hymes, 1962 ). Specifically, the researcher needs to know how to communicate like the insiders in order to articulate and explain the behaviors and communicative phenomena to other outsiders. The researcher also needs to gain competence particularly in the multidisciplinary methods of LSI.

However, neither reliance on English as lingua franca for LSI research nor the practice of hiring translators are sufficient for undertaking this line of inquiry successfully. Therefore, many LSI studies recruit international scholars to participate in their research projects. While this is a common practice, especially in CuDA, the researchers’ cultural interpretations and the subsequent translation of the data into the English for publications need to be done with utmost care in order to maintain the integrity of cultural nuances. Moreover, while the scholarship has strived to give voice to muted, non-dominant groups internationally, the dearth of cross-comparative studies—a goal and a tradition of ethnography—is a great concern. In that sense the study of intercultural interaction using the ethnography of communication has not yet come of age in this increasingly globalized and complex world.

This essay outlines the history and evolution of the study of language and culture by the main areas of study in the LSI discipline. The four main areas summarized are language pragmatics, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, and the ethnography of communication. Influential methodological and theoretical frameworks reviewed cover the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, speech act theory, Grice’s maxims of implicatures, politeness theory, discursive psychology, critical discourse analysis, the ethnography of speaking, speech codes theory, and cultural discourse analysis. Finally, the essay examines major criticisms of the theories and applications, as well as possible future directions of scholarship, when and where appropriate in the discussion.

Developing language in a developing body: the relationship between motor development and language development *

Jana m iverson.

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Address for correspondence : Jana M. Iverson, Dept. of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, 3415 Sennott Square, 210 S. Bouquet St., Pittsburgh, PA 15260 USA. tel : +001 (412) 624-6160; fax : +001 (412) 624-4428; [email protected]

Issue date 2010 Mar.

During the first eighteen months of life, infants acquire and refine a whole set of new motor skills that significantly change the ways in which the body moves in and interacts with the environment. In this review article, I argue that motor acquisitions provide infants with an opportunity to practice skills relevant to language acquisition before they are needed for that purpose; and that the emergence of new motor skills changes infants’ experience with objects and people in ways that are relevant for both general communicative development and the acquisition of language. Implications of this perspective for current views of co-occurring language and motor impairments and for methodology in the field of child language research are also considered.

The emergence of language is one of the crowning achievements of the first two years of life. We now know a great deal about developmental precursors to language and its timetable of emergence in both typically and atypically developing children; and it is widely acknowledged that there are links between achievements in the cognitive and social communication domains and the emerging language system.

During the first eighteen months of life, however, infants also acquire and refine a whole set of new motor skills that fundamentally transform their experiences with objects and people. Indeed, independent locomotion is one of, if not the developmental event most eagerly anticipated by proud parents; and, along with the acquisition of language, it is one with the greatest impact on the infant’s world.

Despite widespread interest in describing ways in which the emergence of behaviors in the cognitive and social communication domains are related to and may even predict advances in language, little attention has been devoted to exploring the relationship between motor development and language development (but see Darrah, Hodge, Magill-Evans & Kembhavi, 2003 ; Le Normand, Vaivre-Douret & Delfosse, 1995 ; Molfese & Betz, 1987 ). This is particularly surprising given the long-standing, widespread but empirically unverified belief among parents, pediatricians and even some developmentalists that when children are in the process of acquiring new motor skills, progress in language comes to a halt (see Tipps, Mira & Cairns, 1981 ).

One reason for the lack of attention to the relationship between motor development and language development may be the general neglect within psychology of ‘movement’ as a topic of study. It is a paradox, indeed, that in a science of behavior, research on movement and motor control has little more than ‘Cinderella’ status within the field (see Rosenbaum (2005) for a lovely discussion of this issue).

A second reason may have to do with the fact that older views seen as ascribing parallels in motor and language milestone achievement to neuromotor maturation (e.g. Gesell, 1929 ; McGraw, 1943 ) are also thought to have been largely discredited. Indeed, it was in response to maturationism of this sort that early child-language researchers set out to characterize language development as a different kind of developmental task, arguing that because language requires abilities that are domain-specific, the process of language learning was fundamentally different from that of motor development (e.g. Lenneberg, 1967 ).

One premise of this article is that the development of language should be viewed in the context of the body in which the developing language system is embedded. In infancy, there are significant changes in the ways in which the body moves in and interacts with the environment; and these may in turn impact the development of skills and experiences that play a role in the emergence of communication and language. In the sections that follow, I review literature and reinterpret published findings related to the development and refinement of motor skills in infancy and their potential impact on the developing language system. The central claim is that changes in motor skills (i.e. achievements and advances in posture, independent locomotion and object manipulation) provide infants with a broader and more diverse set of opportunities for acting in the world. These opportunities provide contexts for acquiring, practicing and refining skills that contribute, both directly and indirectly, to the development of communication and language.

Before proceeding to this review, however, it is necessary to offer five caveats. First, for purposes of this article, ‘motor development’ is defined in terms of the larger motor system, exclusive of the movements involved in speech articulation. It is indisputable that speech production is a motor act, and links between oral-motor physiology, skill acquisition and oral language have been described elsewhere (e.g. Green & Wilson, 2006 ; Nip, Green & Marx, 2009 ; Thelen, 1991 ). While learning to coordinate and control the speech articulators is a core component of oral language development, it falls beyond the scope of this paper except insofar as it reflects developments in other motor systems (e.g. rhythmic arm movement), a topic to which I will return.

Second, for children learning signed languages, the primary articulators are, of course, the hands and arms, and there is evidence that motoric factors constrain children’s early sign production (e.g. Meier, Mauk, Cheek & Moreland, 2008 ). Although spoken and signed language acquisition involves different articulators, a number of the issues to be discussed below are equally relevant to language development in both modalities.

Third, while there is a rich and rapidly growing literature detailing neurophysiological links between language and motor functions in adults (for an excellent recent review, see Willems & Hagoort, 2007 ), comparable data are not yet available for very young children. Thus, the focus of this article will be on behavioral rather than neurophysiological studies that speak to the relationship between motor and language development.

Fourth, the discussion that follows will be restricted to addressing evidence concerning the relationship between motor and language development in typically developing children. Questions concerning the relationship between risk status and motor development, the nature of motor delay and the effect of motor delay on language development in atypical populations are of great theoretical and practical interest; but they are, unfortunately, also beyond the scope of this discussion, albeit I will return to this topic very briefly in the ‘Conclusion’, when I discuss the implications of points made here for future research.

Finally, the link between language and gesture is, of course, an instantiation of the relationship between the language and motor systems. A substantial body of literature focusing on the nature and development of this link has been reviewed in detail elsewhere (e.g. Goldin-Meadow & Iverson, in press ; McNeill, 2006 ); and it will therefore not be a focus of this review. Instead I will focus on other examples of the broader interface between the language and motor systems in development.

The body of this paper is organized in three major sections. The first addresses the issue of parallels that exist in the average ages of motor and language milestone achievement during the first year and reviews correlational analyses of individual differences in ages of milestone achievement. These data are consistent with the view that developments in these areas are not a simple function of underlying neuromotor maturation.

Next, I discuss evidence concerning the relationship between rhythmic arm movement and the onset of reduplicated babble, changes in infants’ skill in object displacement in relation to first words and the vocabulary spurt, and the emergence of naming in action and in words. These findings are used to support the claim that motor acquisitions provide infants with an opportunity to practice skills relevant to language acquisition before they are needed for that purpose.

Finally, I review data on the impact of the emergence of crawling and walking on communicative development and of unsupported sitting, object mouthing and object manipulation on prelinguistic vocalization. The interpretation of the data presented here is that the emergence of new motor skills changes infants’ experience with objects and people in ways that are relevant for both general communicative development and the acquisition of language.

LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IS NOT A SIMPLE CONSEQUENCE OF NEUROMOTOR MATURATION

More than sixty years after the fact, and in an era in which the syntactic, semantic, lexical and phonological complexity of language is taken for granted, it may be difficult to appreciate the force of one of the very first questions to be raised about the relation of language to motor development. This was the question of the extent to which the emergence of language is dependent on neuromotor maturational processes. The maturationist view derived in part from the work of Gesell (1929) , who claimed that ‘[t]he developmental complex as a whole, in spite of its manifoldness, tends to proceed as a whole … When the complex is divided into motor, language, adaptive, and personal-social behavior aspects, these factors prove to cohere to a considerable degree’ (p. 126). But, as Lenneberg (1967) pointed out in a classic work, it was also seemingly suggested by the fact that major speech milestones are reached in a fixed sequence and at relatively constant chronological ages and by the fact that there is ‘a remarkable synchronization of speech milestones with motor-developmental milestones’ (p. 127). Indeed, and paradoxically, since it was his goal to argue strongly against the maturationist view, Lenneberg even provided a table (Table 4.1, pp. 128–30) with illustrative examples of concurrent developments in language and motor abilities. During the first year, for example:

At twenty weeks, infants begin to sit with support. Vocalizations, which previously consisted of vowel-like cooing sounds, are now interspersed with consonant-like sounds.

At 0;6, infants begin to sit independently and are able to lean forward and reach unilaterally while sitting. Cooing changes into babbling that resembles single-syllable utterances; but neither vowels nor consonants have fixed recurrences.

At 0;12, children can walk when held by one hand and mouthing of objects has almost ceased. Vocalizations contain an increased frequency of occurrence of identical sound sequences; and words (e.g. mamma or dadda ) begin to emerge.

Although examples such as these might appear to provide evidence of links between motor and language development (an issue to which I will return below), Lenneberg (1967) used them as a means for making a strong argument against this view, claiming not only that ‘the onset of language is not simply the consequence of motor control’ (p. 127) but that there is ‘independence of language development from motor coordination’ (p. 131). His claim was based on two principles: (a) that the development of language is independent of articulatory skills; and (b) that mastery of articulation patterns cannot be predicted on the basis of general motor development.

With regard to the first, Lenneberg (1967) cites the common observation that most children produce a word or two before they begin to walk, suggesting that even before the end of the first year they possess some of the articulatory skill necessary for speech production; and yet subsequent vocabulary growth occurs in an exceedingly slow manner, indicating its dependence on factors other than articulatory skill. Along similar lines, children who produce single words cannot be trained to combine two words into a single utterance, even though they babble for periods longer than the duration of sentences and often with adult-like intonation. In Lenneberg’s view, phenomena such as these indicate that the availability of articulatory abilities is not sufficient for language development; there must be other psychological factors that are responsible for its slow pace.

With regard to the second principle, Lenneberg (1967) noted that while manual skills in early childhood show improved coordination relative to those in infancy, manual dexterity is still quite immature on an absolute scale, falling far below future levels of accomplishment. By contrast, speech articulation, which requires extremely precise and rapid movements of the lips and tongue in finely tuned coordination with activity in the laryngeal and respiratory systems, is all but fully developed by age 3;0. Lenneberg interpreted this difference between manual and speech articulatory skills as an indication that the development of speech control is independent of the development of hand and finger control.

While Lenneberg’s (1967) analysis was based on general patterns in the average age of motor and language milestone achievement, his argument gained further support from longitudinal studies of individual differences in early language and motor development carried out by Bates, Benigni, Bretherton, Camaioni & Volterra (1979) and Bloom (1993) . In both studies, measures of motor development were included as proxy variables for physical and neural maturation with a view to demonstrating that observed relationships between aspects of cognitive, communicative and language development were not simply a product of global maturation.

Thus, for example, Bates et al . (1979 : Ch. 2) included an eleven-item locomotor development scale in a longitudinal study of twenty-five infants followed from 0;9 to 0;12. Ages of onset for major locomotor milestones spanning the first three years (e.g. sitting without support, pulling to a stand, walking independently, jumping) were reported by mothers and verified by experimenter observation at monthly home visits. A single score was derived from both the maternal report and the observations and included in correlational analyses with maternal report and observational measures of gestural communication and language.

Although Bates et al . (1979) did not provide specific values for correlational analyses carried out between gestural communication and locomotor development, they note that:

Correlations among communicative variables would be of relatively little interest if they were simple epiphenomena of general physical and neural maturation. Insofar as the locomotor development scale is an adequate measure of physical maturation, we can conclude that the pattern of results for gestural communication is not an artifact of very general developmental factors. Locomotion correlated positively and significantly with the gestural measures in only 4 out of 200 possible relationships, or 2% of the matrix. (p. 94)

A comparable result was obtained with the various language measures (e.g. comprehension, babble, word production). Although, again, no specific correlation values are reported, the authors state that only 15 out of 120 possible correlations were significant, and that the correlations between language and locomotor development were much lower than those for the language measures with one another. Based on these findings, they concluded that ‘ it is, then, extremely unlikely that the relationships among various aspects of early language development are artifacts of general maturation’ (p. 102).

A similar approach was taken by Bloom and colleagues in a longitudinal study of the relation between object play and language ( Lifter & Bloom, 1989 ; see Bloom, 1993 ). The fourteen infants who participated in the study visited the laboratory for monthly play sessions between the ages of 0;8 and 2;2. While the study was designed to focus on developmental changes in infants’ object play and vocabulary acquisition (see additional discussion below), the investigators also included two measures of motor development: age of walk onset (defined as the ability to take two independent steps without support or assistance) and performance on a block building task, in which infants were given a set of 1-inch wooden cubes and encouraged to build a tower. The criterion for passing the task was independent construction (i.e. with no direct adult assistance) of a tower of six cubes.

In line with Bates et al . (1979) , Bloom (1993) noted that the walk onset and block building measures were intended to provide a means for determining whether any observed relationships between variables of interest (i.e. play and language development) were independent of age, and not a product of ‘simple maturation’. Along these lines, she reports that age at walk onset was not systematically related to the age at which the first word was produced, and that although the mean age for walk onset for the group of children was one month prior to that for first words, earlier and later word learners did not differ in average age of walking. Thus, all of the later word learners (but only two of the early word learners) walked before they said their first words.

Progress in block building was also generally independent of developments in play and language. All of the children, regardless of the timing of achievements in play and language, were similar in age when they first passed the block building task. Bloom (1993) cites the examples of Shirley, who reached first words and the vocabulary spurt at 0;10 and 1; 1, respectively, and Jessica, who reached these milestones at 1;2 and 1;10; but despite this variation in language abilities, both succeeded at constructing a tower of six blocks at 1;9 but not at 1;6. Based on these results, Bloom concluded that ‘block building is a motor skill that is age related and determined by maturation. In contrast, developments in play and language … were not simply a function of age and general maturation’ (p. 239).

In sum, the view of motor development and its potential relationship to language development described above makes a clear distinction between achievements in the two domains. The general theoretical goal of this research, broadly speaking, was to demonstrate that the development of language involves a unique constellation of interrelated cognitive and symbolic abilities (many of which are not language-specific) that come together at a particular point in time. Because motor development was conceptualized as a proxy variable for general maturation, it needed to be explicitly ruled out in order to make the argument for direct, specific relations between language and other cognitive and symbolic abilities.

In an era in which the relationship between language and other cognitive and symbolic abilities is no longer controversial and in which few (if any) would argue that language development is a simple product of neuromotor maturation, these results are not unexpected. Unfortunately, however, they can be easily misinterpreted as suggesting that infant motor skills and motor development during the first eighteen months are irrelevant to the development of language. That this is a misinterpretation is perhaps the major point of this article. My defense of this proposal proceeds in the following way. In the next section, I argue from developmental evidence that the acquisition of motor skills provides infants with an opportunity to practice skills relevant to language acquisition before they are needed for that purpose. I then show that the emergence of new motor skills changes infants’ experience with objects and people in ways that are relevant for both general communicative development and the acquisition of language.

SPECIFIC MOTOR BEHAVIORS PROVIDE THE OPPORTUNITY TO ACQUIRE AND PRACTICE SKILLS CRITICAL FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE

Interest in examining relationships between developments in language and other non-linguistic domains (e.g. play, symbolic abilities) grew rapidly in the 1970s, and a number of researchers began to document correspondences between milestones in the development of non-linguistic skills and achievements in language (e.g. Corrigan, 1979 ; Nicolich, 1977 ; Snyder, 1978 ). This work was part of a broader theoretical effort to demonstrate that language is not solely a product of domain-specific, dedicated processes and abilities, but rather draws on skills from other domains. Thus, for example, Bates et al . (1979) argued that the links observed between achievements in non-linguistic cognition (e.g. symbolic play) and early developments in language were indicative of the emergence between 0;9 and 1;0 of a general symbolic function manifested not only in language behaviors but also in behaviors outside the realm of language (e.g. in play-related actions).

A key characteristic of the non-linguistic behaviors explored in relation to language during this period was that they were classic sensorimotor behaviors of the sort described by Piaget (1952) . Studies in this tradition focused primarily on describing these behaviors in terms of the underlying cognitive abilities that they revealed and the relevance of those abilities for language development (e.g. Bates et al ., 1979 ). In the context of the current discussion, however, it is important to emphasize that although these sensorimotor behaviors are undoubtedly indices of underlying cognitive change, they are also motor behaviors, behaviors that represent advances in the infant’s capacity for action. In this section, I consider three sensorimotor behaviors – rhythmic arm movement, object construction, and recognitory gestures – from an action perspective and explore ways in which the emergence and development of these actions provide infants with opportunities to practice skills that are ultimately shared with language. Practicing these skills in the context of concrete action provides infants with immediate and salient visual, auditory and kinesthetic feedback, the opportunity to observe the result of the action in relation to this feedback, and a means for beginning to notice and attend to the relationship between their own motor action and its effects.

Example 1: increased rhythmic arm movement coincides with the onset of reduplicated babble

In a longitudinal study of rhythmic motor stereotypies in typically developing infants during the first year of life, Thelen (1979) reported a striking peak in frequency of rhythmic arm movements (e.g. shaking, swinging, banging) at around twenty-eight weeks of age. This is also the age at which many infants begin to produce reduplicated babble, vocalizations in which well-formed syllables are organized into a regularly timed, rhythmically organized sequence (e.g. [bababa]; Koopmans-van Beinum & van der Stelt, 1986 ; Oller & Eilers, 1988 ).

Several longitudinal studies have explored the nature of the relationship between rhythmic arm activity and onset of reduplicated babble by following infants from the pre-babble period through the onset of reduplicated babble. In the first of these, Eilers, Oller, Levine, Basinger, Lynch & Urbano (1993) followed infants from the second month of life, with regular laboratory observations occurring every two to four weeks. Parents reported the onset of rhythmic hand banging and reduplicated babble, and behavior onset was credited when an experimenter confirmed the parent’s report via observation during a subsequent lab visit.

Results indicated that the mean age of onset of rhythmic hand banging preceded that for reduplicated babble by two to three weeks. Although no correlational analyses are presented and the extent to which this pattern was apparent in individual infants within the sample is not described, these data suggest the possibility that hand banging may present an opportunity for practicing the production of rhythmically organized, tightly timed actions of the sort required for babbling. Specifically, hand banging produces highly redundant, multimodal feedback that facilitates infants’ growing awareness of correlations between their own movements and resultant sound patterns. When infants engage in rhythmic banging, they feel themselves move, they see the movement of their arms, and they hear the resultant sound, all occurring in synchrony. The extensive literature on multimodal perception in young infants (see Lewkowicz (2000) for a review) suggests that infants are highly sensitive to this type of synchrony, and that the presence of such redundant cues facilitates recognition of contingencies (e.g. Gogate & Bahrick, 1998 ; Gogate, Bolzani & Betancourt, 2006 ). When infants subsequently begin to babble, they may very well be better prepared to recognize the contingent auditory feedback from their own sound production, feedback that allows them to monitor and adjust the state of the vocal tract as they vary their sound production.

Support for this view comes from three longitudinal studies that have taken a milestone-based approach to the relationship between rhythmic arm movement and reduplicated babble ( Ejiri, 1998 ; Iverson, Hall, Nickel & Wozniak, 2007 ; Locke, Bekken, McMinn-Larson & Wein, 1995 ). In all of these studies, infants were given rattles to shake, their rattle-shaking was observed in sessions prior to, at and following the onset of reduplicated babble, and changes in rhythmic arm activity were examined as a function of time relative to babble onset (i.e. without regard to infant chronological age). The consistent finding was that rhythmic arm shaking was lowest in pre-babbling infants, increased sharply in infants who had just begun to babble, and then began to decline as infants became experienced babblers. This pattern (distinct time of onset, peak and decline) parallels that of developmental trajectories observed for other rhythmic stereotypies ( Thelen, 1979 ). Thus, for example, infants rock on all fours before they crawl and wave their arms before they reach; and once these milestones have been attained, rocking and arm waving become less frequent. On this view, once infants have begin to babble, rhythmic arm activity may have accomplished at least part of its developmental task – providing infants with a rich sensorimotor context for practicing skills that underlie (at least in part) the production of reduplicated babble.

The close temporal relationship between reduplicated babble and rhythmic arm activity is often interpreted as indicating that babble is one of a family of rhythmically organized motor stereotypies that emerge and are commonly produced by infants during the first year of life (e.g. MacNeilage & Davis, 2000 ; Kent, 1984 ; Iverson et al ., 2007 ; Meier, McGarvin, Zakia & Willerman, 1997 ) and as evidence of a tight, specific link between the manual system and the oral–vocal system (e.g. Iverson & Thelen, 1999 ). The data reviewed above suggest a third, complementary interpretation of this relationship, namely that skills observed in rhythmic arm activity are shared by reduplicated babble. As infants perform rhythmic arm movements, they have the opportunity to practice a skill – production of rhythmically organized, tightly timed actions – that is a central characteristic of reduplicated babble. Hand banging provides a supportive context for the development of this skill because it provides multimodal feedback that allows the infant to observe (and vary) the relationship between a concrete action and its auditory and visual properties.

Example 2: developments in object displacements in play are related to first words and the vocabulary spurt

Lifter & Bloom (1989 ; see also Bloom, 1993) conducted a longitudinal study of the relationship between language and object knowledge, as indexed by object displacements in spontaneous play. They focused specifically on identifying developments in play and their relationship to the emergence of specific object knowledge, i.e. of the perceptual and functional attributes that differentiate objects from one another. They reasoned that the extent to which children’s actions with objects took account of specific properties of those objects provided a source of information for inferring the object-specific knowledge that underlies the formation of the object concepts necessary for talking about objects and events. Once again, however, it is important to note here that the development of action on objects depends not only on cognitive gains but also on gains in motor skills such as unilateral reaching, use of a pincer grip, finer eye-hand coordination, and independent use of the hands and arms in relation to one another.

In their longitudinal study of infants seen monthly between the ages of 0;8 and 2;2, Lifter & Bloom (1989) examined object displacement activities, defined as actions in which infants moved one toy in relation to another (e.g. dropping a bead into a container, putting one nesting cup into another, feeding a doll with a spoon) ‘with deliberate volition to achieve the action’ (p. 399). The primary criterion for ‘volition ’ was that the infant had to orient to the object first and then act on it ; success in achieving the target action was not considered in this coding decision, but random encounters with objects (e.g. accidentally dropping a bead into a box) were ignored.

Once object displacements had been identified, an initial distinction was made between those that were separations , involving disassembly of a complex object into components (e.g. taking a peg person out of a seesaw), and those that were constructions , involving assembly of a more complex object out of components (e.g. putting a peg person into a seesaw). Constructions were then subclassified according to whether or not they: (a) were imposed by the child and differed from those originally presented by the researchers (e.g. putting a peg person into a nesting cup); and (b) made use of particular properties of objects in relation to one another (e.g. stringing beads; feeding a doll with a spoon).

Developments in language were tracked by transcribing word use at each session and identifying the ages of onset of first words (i.e. the session at which one conventional word was used at least twice) and the vocabulary spurt (i.e. the session at which twelve new words had been added since the previous visit, after reaching a baseline of twenty words) for each child. This permitted the examination of developmental changes in action on objects in relation to both chronological age and language level.

There was a clear developmental progression in infants’ action that was closely linked to achievements in language. During the prespeech period, the vast majority of infants’ object displacements involved taking things apart. With the advent of first words, however, putting things together not only became progressively more frequent, but children also began to put objects together in ways that they had not previously seen them combined (e.g. putting a bead inside a nesting cup rather than putting one nesting cup inside another). During the vocabulary spurt, constructions began to make use of specific features rather than generic characteristics of objects (e.g. putting a bead on a string rather than simply placing the bead inside a nesting cup). This developmental progression in action on objects and its association with achievements in language was observed in all of the children despite substantial individual differences in rate of language acquisition. Bloom (1993) has argued that this parallelism reflects common developments in underlying cognition, specifically changes in object concepts and advances in the ability to access this knowledge for actions with both objects and words.

While Bloom’s (1993) interpretation makes excellent sense, it is important to reiterate that these common developments in underlying cognition themselves depend on advances in infant capacity for action. Infants in this study began by engaging primarily, if not exclusively, in separating objects. Separating is a relatively simple motor task: it only requires the infant to grasp one object and pull at it to make the configuration come apart. Although objects can, in principle, be immediately put back together once they are separated, Lifter & Bloom (1989) note that at this early object separation stage infants generally did not do so; rather, it was mothers who often reconstructed the configurations so that the infants could separate them again. They also point out that as infants repeatedly take constructions apart, they learn about the separateness of objects and that objects can be joined together; in other words, that ‘[l]earning how to construct a relation begins with learning how to take it apart’ (p. 414).

In short, the emergence of constructions indexes two closely related progressions in infant action. The first is the recognition that things go together, indicated in the context of action by placing them in physical relationship to one another (e.g. a bead can be put in a nesting cup). The second, and perhaps even more fundamental recognition, however, is that actions are reversible; in other words, that the bead that can be dumped out of the nesting cup can also be put back in it. Armed with these two new possibilities for action, infants can not only construct relations; they can also experiment with creating varying and novel combinations of constructions. Such an infant can now not only put a bead in a nesting cup and take it out, but then put it into a toy car, pick up a peg person and put the peg person in the now-empty nesting cup.

In the context of these play actions, the child has the opportunity to notice, attend more specifically to, and learn about progressively more specific properties of objects. Thus, in creating different constructions involving nesting cups and beads, the child might notice the fact that the nesting cup can serve as a container for many different toys and that the bead has a small hole in it. In other words, in the course of putting toys together and observing the consequences of these actions, children begin to link objects with meanings created in the context of their actions, i.e. the nesting cup is a container. The ability to connect meaning with a referent is, of course, fundamental for word learning.

Finally, as children notice progressively more specific characteristics of objects – that, for example, the bead has a small hole in it – opportunities for more refined actions on those objects are created. When the child notices that the hole in the bead is similar in diameter to the string, she might attempt to put the bead on the string. Even if this action is unsuccessful and the bead falls off the string, the physical attempt to create this highly specific construction provides an opportunity to give additional meaning to the bead: where it was previously something to be put in a container, it is now something that can also be strung. As Bloom (1993) suggests, the increasing specificity observed in children’s object constructions over time provides evidence of development in the ability to attribute mental meanings that are increasingly varied and elaborated. The critical point here, however, is that these mental meanings – and their links with objects – are given in the context of developing physical action: playing with, manipulating and acting on toys in new and progressively more specific ways. These new forms of action depend in turn on developing motor skills.

To summarize, developmental progression in action on objects and achievements in early language development are closely associated, and intersections between these domains are traditionally interpreted as reflecting advances in common underlying cognition. A complementary perspective is that physical action on objects sets a context for attributing meaning to those objects via action. As infants act on objects in increasingly sophisticated ways dependent on increasingly sophisticated motor skills, they are presented with the opportunity to notice more specific object features. As they refine their actions further in order to make use of these features, they are able to attribute increasingly specific meanings to objects. This latter development is of particular importance inasmuch as learning words requires, among other things, the mapping of specific meanings to specific referents.

Example 3: the emergence of naming in action and language

A final example of correspondence between milestones in motor action and language is evident in work begun in the Piagetian tradition, pursued by Bates and colleagues (e.g. Bates et al ., 1979 ) during the 1970s and 1980s, and revisited most recently by Volterra and colleagues (e.g. Capirci, Contaldo, Caselli & Volterra, 2005 ; Volterra, Caselli, Capirci & Pizzuto, 2005 ). At issue in this work is a behavioral phenomenon frequently termed ‘recognitory gesture’. 1 Recognitory gestures are actions that are brief, stylized versions of the actions typically produced on associated objects. For instance, when an infant between the ages of 0;9 and 1;0 first catches sight of a toy telephone among her play objects, she may pick up the receiver, touch it momentarily to her ear and then immediately set it down. Through this gesture, the child is, in effect, indicating recognition that she knows what the object is. Additional examples might include making a brief stirring motion with a toy spoon or touching a hairbrush briefly to the hair.

There are two indications that recognitory gestures are not simply a product of the infant’s attempt to imitate the prototypical actions that adults produce with objects. The first is that, unlike adult models for these actions (e.g. holding up the telephone receiver to the ear and talking), the infant version is, as indicated above, generally very brief and incomplete, lasting only two to three seconds. The second is that the recognitory gesture does not appear to be an attempt to satisfy a need; for example, an infant might pick up an empty cup and touch it briefly to the lips, not in an attempt to drink from a cup that contains no liquid but rather to show by means of the gesture that the cup is used for ‘drinking’.

The appearance of recognitory gestures marks an important transition in infant action. Prior to the emergence of these gestures, infants act on objects for the purpose of manipulating them. When an infant aged 0;7 plays with a toy telephone, he may shake the cord, bang on the base, mouth the receiver or run an exploratory finger over the buttons. Although these actions reflect growing sophistication in object manipulation, they are relatively generic and could, in principle, be applied to any number of different objects. With the appearance of recognitory gestures, however, comes evidence of an emerging ability to use action for the purpose of assigning specific meanings to objects. At 0;10, when an infant picks up the phone receiver and briefly touches it to her ear, she is not merely manipulating the receiver; she is reflecting her awareness that the object has a specific meaning, that it is, in other words, a telephone.

Recognitory gestures of this sort not only indicate the emergence of the infant’s ability to assign meaning intentionally, they also provide infants with a way of practicing meaning-making at a point in development at which they are just beginning to face the problem of using words to convey meaning. Furthermore, this practice takes place in a concrete context. Unlike word–referent links, which are generally highly abstract and require the child to pair arbitrary sound productions with meaning, the link between a recognitory gesture and its referent is relatively concrete. Meaning is assigned through a non-arbitrary action that produces immediate perceptual and proprioceptive feedback. Thus, for example, unlike the word phone , which bears no physical resemblance to its referent, the recognitory gesture ‘phone’ incorporates elements of the action (albeit in stylized form) that is typically associated with and conforms to the physical characteristics (size, shape, etc.) of the telephone. Furthermore, as the infant brings the telephone receiver to her ear, she feels the movement of her arm, the object in her hand, and ultimately the contact between the receiver and the side of her head. If a helpful adult is nearby, she may even receive some timely linguistic input: ‘That’s right, that’s a phone. Are you calling someone? Is that Daddy?’ At such moments, infants learn not only about action–referent mappings, but that they themselves are capable of making meaning, meaning that is appreciated by others in their environment.

In line with this view, Capirci et al . (2005) recently observed that meanings that infants initially ‘practiced’ in recognitory gestures were highly likely to enter their communicative repertoires as representational (i.e. empty-handed) gestures and/or words. In a longitudinal study of three children, these investigators found that the percentage of semantic overlap (i.e. the percentage of items in the repertoire that conveyed the same meaning) between recognitory gestures and representational gestures and/or words ranged from 88% to 97.5% and that recognitory gestures corresponding in meaning with a representational gesture and/or a word generally appeared before the emergence of the corresponding representational gesture/word. In addition, as the authors note: ‘Almost all actions were produced by the three children in a situation in which the caregiver was present and was making comments and attributing meaning to the action performed by the child’ (p. 173).

The role of recognitory gesture in early symbolic development has been extensively discussed in the theoretical literature ( Inhelder, Lézine, Sinclair & Stambak, 1971 ; Piaget, 1952 ; Werner & Kaplan, 1963 ). A common theme in these discussions is that recognitory gestures are yet another manifestation of the emergence of a general symbolic capacity toward the end of the first year. Indeed, Escalona (1973) has even argued that infants use recognitory gestures in much the same ways as they do first words: to identify, recognize, categorize or ‘name’ an object, event, or class of objects and events. For this reason, she refers to recognitory gestures as ‘enactive naming’ because, as Bates, Bretherton, Snyder, Shore & Volterra (1980) have suggested, ‘infants seem to be using these schemes for a very different function than the one originally intended by the culture: to label a known object by carrying out an activity typically associated with that object’ (p. 408).

The most widely cited evidence for the view that recognitory gestures are a type of naming comes from longitudinal work carried out by Bates et al . (1979) and Volterra, Bates, Benigni, Bretherton & Camaioni (1979) . This research gathered detailed information about the vocal and gestural repertoires of twnety-five Italian and American infants between the ages of 0;9 and 1;1 and involved a combination of observational data and maternal report measures. They documented a series of close parallels in the development of recognitory gestures and first words. Two of these are of particular importance for the present discussion.

First, recognitory gestures and first words appeared in individual children’s repertoires at around the same time, though there was considerable variability in the ages at which they were first observed and the rate at which they emerged. In addition, they tended to refer to a common set of meanings: eating, dressing, playing with vehicles, telephones, games of exchange and peekaboo, bathing, and doll play. Indeed, there was considerable overlap in the content of the vocal and gestural repertoires when they were compiled across children. Interestingly, however, this redundancy was uncommon among individual children: it was not the case that each child who had a recognitory gesture for a given object also produced the corresponding word.

Second, over the course of the period from 0;9 to 1;1, both recognitory gestures and words underwent a similar process of decontextualization, progressing from initially highly context-bound productions to application across a broader set of contexts. Thus, for recognitory gestures, the following developmental progression was noted (see also Nicolich, 1977 ):

Briefly carrying out an object-related activity to recognize appropriate object use (e.g. briefly bringing a telephone receiver to the ear).

Carrying out a familiar activity that is within the child’s existing repertoire, but outside of its usual context (e.g. ‘sleeping’ with head on the table).

Carrying out actions with others in which child’s role is reversed (e.g. rather than feeding himself, the child feeds mommy or a doll) or that are typically associated with others (taking on an adult role; e.g. vacuuming, wiping the highchair tray with a cloth).

Carrying out an action with a substitute object (e.g. using a spoon as a telephone).

In the course of this decontextualization process, infants apply action schemes across a widening range of contexts, to progressively more abstract objects, and to different recipients. This is suggestive of two major developments. First, production of recognitory gestures (and of meanings in general) becomes less reliant on contextual support. Thus, where the ‘phone’ recognitory gesture was once produced only in the presence of the toy telephone and was only self-directed, it eventually begins to be applied to other objects (e.g. using a spoon as a telephone) and to other individuals (e.g. holding the receiver to the doll’s ear). In other words, production of the ‘phone’ gesture no longer requires a precise replica of the conditions under which the action first emerged (i.e. during spontaneous play with the toy telephone).

The second development is that as infants gradually extend action schemes outside the original context of production, they begin to appreciate the fact that a common action and therefore a common meaning can be applied to a variety of different objects. An infant might, for example, assign ‘phone’ meaning by making the ‘phone’ gesture not only with the toy telephone, but also with a spoon, a rattle and a plastic banana.

Thus, production of recognitory gestures provides infants with opportunities to learn: (a) that meanings are context-independent; and therefore (b) that the same meaning can be assigned to different objects in different contexts. While objects and contexts may vary, a particular and specific meaning can remain invariant. This sets the stage for one of the most important advances in early language development, namely the recognition that because a given word can be used to refer to a range of referents (e.g. dog can refer to the family Saint Bernard, a pictured story-book chihuahua, and a Great Dane seen in the park), word meanings are both general and relatively specific. As infants begin to use first words, this is something that they must come to understand.

Understanding of this sort, however, develops only gradually. As Volterra et al . (1979) have observed, first words, like recognitory gestures, also undergo a process of decontextualization. Infants’ initial word productions are highly context-bound and, more specifically, bound to particular actions and procedures with which they have been associated. In the Volterra et al . data, most instances of early word use occurred as the child executed a specific action in a specific context. Thus, for example, bye-bye was initially produced only when the child was putting down the phone receiver. At this point in development, the meaning of bye-bye was something like ‘breaking contact while putting down a phone receiver’, a meaning both limited to a single context and given by reference to the entire context of action and object rather than to a specific referent.

As development proceeds, the infant extends bye-bye to contexts beyond that of hanging up the phone. With extension, meaning becomes not only increasingly context-flexible (e.g. bye-bye is now produced not only when putting down the phone receiver, but also when people are departing, when a toy disappears from sight and when someone is preparing to leave the house) but specific ( bye-bye now represents breaking contact, regardless of the immediate context). Decontextualization of recognitory gesture, in which the child practices assigning common meaning in multiple and varying contexts, helps set the stage for this advance.

In short, during the period between 0;9 and 1;0, recognitory gestures and first words develop in both content and gradual decontextualization. Not only does this reflect the emergence of a general ability to symbolize (e.g. Bates et al ., 1979 ), it suggests that naming (both gestural and verbal) is born in motor action. Recognitory gestures provide children with the opportunity to practice ‘naming’, first by assigning meaning to an individual referent and then by extending a common meaning across a variety of different referents. Furthermore, and importantly, this prelinguistic ‘naming’ occurs in the domain of action in which the relationship between the action component of the gesture and the referent is both non-arbitrary and concrete. When children then begin to assign meaning using the arbitrary sound productions that constitute words, they can draw upon their experience with recognitory gestural naming to facilitate the acquisition of this new skill. It is therefore not surprising that first words are tightly bound to action and that children are highly likely to name objects as they act on them ( Rodgon, Jankowski & Alenskas, 1977 ; Volterra et al ., 1979 ) or that children’s early words tend to refer to small, easily manipulated objects ( Nelson, 1973 ; Bates et al ., 1979 ).

MOTOR DEVELOPMENT IS AN ORGANIZER FOR COMMUNICATIVE AND LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT

The achievement of motor milestones such as unsupported sitting, reaching, crawling and walking radically alters the infant’s relation to the objects and people in his immediate environment. Infants who can sit without support can freely rotate head and trunk with consequent improvement in visual observation of the surrounding world. An infant who has begun to reach encounters a new set of opportunities with regard to object manipulation and, as any parent knows full well, when infants become mobile, first by crawling and then by walking, they not only greatly extend the range of accessible objects, they alter the possibilities of social interaction in myriad ways. Motor development over the first eighteen months, in other words, radically alters the child’s experience with the world; and this has significant implications for the development of communication in general and language in particular.

Only recently have studies been specifically designed to examine the impact of motor advances on infant communication, and to date they have been relatively few in number. These studies are reviewed in the following two sections of this paper, along with data from other investigations that have explored concurrent relationships between infant motor activity and vocal production. The broad theme to be developed here is that motor abilities, and the advances that occur in these abilities during the first two years of life, organize a whole series of experiences that expand infants’ interactions with their environments and the objects and individuals in it and thereby create altered possibilities for communicative and language development.

Motor development and communication

Two studies to date have examined the influence of experience with new forms of locomotion on communicative development. One focused on crawling experience in relation to the ability to follow referential signals, and the second explored ways in which the transition to walking impacts infants’ production of communicative bids related to objects.

In a line of research designed to examine the consequences of the onset of crawling, Campos, Anderson, Barbu-Roth, Hubbard, Hertenstein & Witherington (2000) proposed that the emergence of ability to follow eye gaze and pointing directed toward distal objects – a major milestone in the development of joint attention – may be related to crawling experience. The joint attention literature suggests a clear developmental sequence in the emergence of the ability to follow referential gestural communication (i.e. eye gaze with pointing gesture; see Moore, 1999 ). Thus, infants as young as 0;3 can follow an adult’s eye gaze and head turn as long as the adult’s head and the target are in same visual field (e.g. D’Entremont, Hains & Muir, 1997 ). Between 0;8 and 0;10, infants become able to follow a pointing gesture accompanied by eye gaze shift and head turn when the gesturer and the target are in different visual fields. During the second year, this skill is further refined, such that infants become able to localize a target correctly, even when it is located behind them (e.g. Butterworth & Grover, 1990 ).

The rationale for the Campos et al . (2000) proposal is grounded in the observation that when infants begin to crawl, there is a concurrent and dramatic change in the type and source of social signals that they receive. Crawling infants typically encounter risky objects and contexts as they explore their surroundings, and caregivers naturally respond to this by increasing their affective and vocal communication in order to regulate this exploration (e.g. Zumbahlen, 1997 ). Importantly, however, this communication is likely to have a clear distal referent and to come from a communicator who is located at a distance from the infant.

Because there is presumably little need for this type of distal caregiver communication prior to the onset of independent locomotion, it represents a substantial shift in the nature of the social signals directed toward the infant. In other words, as infants locomote and explore their environments, they gain experience attending to and interacting with distally located objects and people; this is a skill that is implicated in the second phase of the developmental sequence for following referential gestural communication described above, i.e. the ability to follow pointing with eye gaze and head turn when the communicator and the referent are in different visual fields. Thus, infants with crawling experience should be more likely to follow such cues than prelocomotor infants.

In support of this notion, Campos et al . (2000) cite an earlier study ( Campos, Kermoian, Witherington, Chen & Dong, 1997 ) that tested this prediction using an age-held-constant design. Participants consisted of three groups of infants all of whom were 0;8.5: prelocomotor infants (i.e. infants who had not yet begun to crawl) with little or no experience in a walker, prelocomotor infants with at least forty hours of experience in a walker, and infants with up to six weeks of hands and knees crawling experience. The testing situation involved eight toys arranged in four pairs and positioned on the left and right sides of a square curtained area. On each trial, the experimenter looked at one of the eight toys and drew the infant’s attention to it, saying ‘Look over there’ while turning her head and eyes and pointing across the body in the direction of the target toy (without extending the arm beyond the body periphery).

Crawling infants and infants with walker experience looked at the correct side (i.e. in the direction that the experimenter looked) on significantly more trials than did prelocomotor infants. In addition, whereas prelocomotor infants looked at the correct and incorrect sides on roughly equal proportions of trials, crawling infants and infants with walker experience looked to the correct side significantly more often than to the incorrect side.

Campos et al . (2000) interpret these results in the context of the following developmental scenario. When a crawling infant encounters a prohibited object, caregivers typically respond with distal communication (often with high affect) to distract or inhibit the infant. When infants are initially exposed to this type of communication, they respond by orienting to the caregiver; and this marks an initial phase in the development of the infant’s attention to the caregiver’s message. Subsequently, and with repeated orienting to the caregiver, the infant is motivated to discover the object of the caregiver’s communication, a process that may be facilitated by enhanced infant attention to distal events and advances in spatial understanding (both of which are related to the onset of crawling; see Campos et al ., 2000 ). As infants both attend to the caregiver and seek to discover the referent of the caregiver’s communication, they gradually come to appreciate the general direction of the caregiver’s head turn, gaze or pointing gesture; and it is this initial general appreciation that has been described as a step in the gradual development of the ability to localize the target of a pointing gesture smoothly and accurately (see Moore, 1999 ).

In the second study, focused on the transition to walking, Karasik, Tamis-LeMonda and Adolph (under review) observed fifty infants at 0;11 and 1;1. At 0;11, all of the infants were crawling; but by 1; 1, half were walking, thereby allowing an examination of whether infants’ communicative object sharing (i.e. showing or offering an object to another person) changed with the onset of walking.

At both ages, infants were observed during everyday activities in the home with a primary caregiver. All episodes involving manual object contact were identified, and the overall duration of each episode was divided into time spent carrying an object (i.e. infant engaged in forward movement while grasping an object) versus grasping an object while remaining stationary. In addition, all instances in which an infant showed or offered a toy to the adult by extending the arm were coded as object-related social bids; these were classified according to whether they were stationary (i.e. infants remained in their position and extended an object toward the person to ‘show’ or ‘offer’) or moving bids (i.e. infants ‘brought’ an object to a person by crawling, cruising or walking).

The onset of walking was related to qualitative changes in the way in which infants engaged with objects and in their object-related social bids. Thus, at 1;1, walkers carried objects more frequently and spent more time traveling with objects overall than did their crawling age-mates. A parallel difference was apparent in infants’ object sharing with their mothers. Specifically, despite the fact that both crawlers and walkers at 1;1 produced object-related social bids and did so with comparable frequency, walkers were more likely than crawlers to share objects by moving to their mothers. Indeed, 44% of walkers’ (but only 3% of crawlers’) bids were characterized as moving bids. Walkers, in other words, were more likely to locomote toward their mothers and then hold out the object for her inspection; but crawlers continued to bid from stationary positions by extending their arms with the object in hand in the mothers’ general direction.

Although crawlers demonstrated the skills necessary for moving bids – they carried objects and they also engaged in object-related bids – they only infrequently brought these skills together in the context of bidding to their mothers. As Karasik et al . (under review) note, there are at least three reasons why the transition from crawling to walking may facilitate the translation of these abilities into moving object bids. First, walking may provide infants with enhanced opportunity to access distally located objects because it is more efficient and less taxing than crawling. Second, the hands are no longer involved in supporting the infant’s weight and can now be used to carry objects. Finally, the upright position of the head afforded by walking provides an elevated vantage point, which may make it easier for infants to see and locate objects and people in their surroundings.

Thus, the transition to walking brings about a change in infant experience: infants are now able to bring an object of interest to an adult in order to share interest and attention to it. This is, of course, the essence of joint attention. Because the object-related social bids of crawling infants are generally limited to nearby objects, bid success requires a fairly attentive adult. Walking infants, on the other hand, are free to travel to an object of interest and then transport it directly to the adult. In other words, with the transition to walking comes a natural broadening of the range of communicative referents available to the infant (i.e. communication can now be about both proximal and distal objects); and the infant can now play a more active role in establishing interaction (see Clearfield, Osborne & Mullen (2008) for a similar argument), selecting precisely those objects that are of interest. Moving bids may also be more salient to caregivers; even if the caregiver is distracted or in the next room, the arrival of an infant whose arm is extended to show an object is a clear social signal that is likely to elicit the caregiver’s attention and result in both the establishment of joint attention to and communication about the object. And because infants are especially likely to learn words when their attention is already focused on the referent (e.g. Tomasello & Farrar, 1986 ), these moving bids, in combination with timely caregiver input, may provide rich opportunities for language learning.

Motor development and language

Three studies to date have provided data consistent with the notion that motor development also provides altered opportunities for infants to explore and expand skills more specifically relevant to the acquisition of oral language. All of these studies focused on prespeech vocalizations in the first year, presumably because of the rapidly changing landscape of motor skills that is evident during this time. Collectively, they suggest that progressions in motor abilities orchestrate opportunities for infants to explore and vary their existing sound production capacities, with consequences that may contribute to developmental change in vocalization characteristics and the speech sound repertoire.

In an unpublished dissertation, Yingling (1981) approached this issue by exploring the possibility that the achievement of unsupported sitting (which results in substantial changes in respiration and the position of the speech articulators) is accompanied by changes in the characteristics of infant vocalizations. Because the rib cage is freed, sitting infants can breathe more deeply and maintain subglottal pressure more consistently than is possible in a supine position. This should, in principle, permit the production of longer strings of utterances in a single breath. In addition, the new upright head position alters the position of the spine and the vocal tract curve; and the tongue falls to a more forward position in the oral cavity. This in turn should enhance the production of consonant–vowel (CV) segments.

Based on these considerations, Yingling (1981) hypothesized that the achievement of independent, unsupported sitting would initiate a transitional period in which vocalizations progress from being highly variable to more closely resembling well-timed, patterned speech. To test this prediction, she followed a group of infants aged 0;5.5 longitudinally through the transition to unsupported sitting, with observations prior to and following attainment of independent sitting.

Spectrographic analyses revealed that vocalizations changed in three major ways after infants began to sit on their own. First, infants began to demonstrate greater control over utterance production, as exemplified in decreased length of individual utterances, greater uniformity in duration, and increased variation in the number of utterances produced in a single breath. Second, there was an overall increase in the frequency of CV units and a corresponding decrease in simple vowel production. Vowel duration also decreased, with production of single, elongated vowels held over the entire length of an expiration becoming much less frequent. And as infants began to produce vowels that were relatively short and clipped, instances of two or more vowels per breath group became more common.

Finally, the number of CV syllables per breath group increased and CVs became shorter and more consistent in duration just before the onset of unsupported sitting. As CV units became more punctate and less variable, there was a corresponding decline in CV repetitions across the post-sitting observations. Thus, as infants became more skilled at maintaining an upright posture, CV production became more consistent; and relative consistency in production is, of course, a hallmark of skilled, controlled behavior.

Taken together, these findings suggest that the onset of unsupported sitting initiates a period of exploration and change in infant vocalization. When infants are first able to maintain an upright sitting position, they ‘discover’ new possibilities for vocal production in the very act of vocalizing. The proprioceptive and auditory feedback generated by these initial experiences then leads to continued exploration of the vocal possibilities generated by enhanced lung capacity and repositioned speech articulators (perhaps most especially the mandible and tongue, which are highly relevant for CV production; e.g. MacNeilage & Davis, 2000 ). In the course of this exploration, as Yingling (1981) put it, ‘the infant’s ‘‘practice-play’’ with speech patterns …become[s] more complex, specifically involving series of sound variations’ (p. 97). In addition, as infants attempt to match target sounds from their ambient language in their own production, they begin to hone in on timing parameters that are present in that language. Indeed, data from Yingling’s final post-sitting session indicated that, in a number of important respects, infant vocalizations were coming to resemble those of adult speech (e.g. embedding of multiple utterances within a breath group, more punctate and word-like utterances).

Two additional studies have explored the relationship between motor activity and vocalization qualities by analyzing vocalizations produced during bouts of object manipulation. In a cross-sectional study of infants between the ages of 0;6 and 0;9, Fagan & Iverson (2007) examined vocalizations produced as infants mouthed objects and compared them to vocalizations produced without co-occurring mouthing. While mouthing has received considerable attention in work on infant object exploration (e.g. Fenson, Kagan, Kearsley & Zelazo, 1976 ; Ruff, 1984 ; R Ruff, Saltarelli, Capazzoli & Dubiner, 1992 ), its possible role in infant vocalization and vocal development has been largely ignored (but see Elbers, 1982 ; Ejiri & Masataka, 2001 ). This is so despite the fact that: (a) the peak period of mouthing as a means of exploring objects, which occurs between ages 0;6 and 0;9, coincides with that for the emergence of consonants; and (b) mouthing of objects can be a means for introducing vocal tract closure, a key feature of supraglottal consonants (consonants formed by the tongue or lips, e.g. [d]). Because infants often explore the sound-related consequences of their actions (e.g. preferring to shake sounding rather than soundless toys), they may appreciate the potential for object mouthing to influence vocalization. As a result, when infants vocalize during mouthing, they may benefit both from proprioceptive feedback regarding oral postures associated with object mouthing and auditory feedback about the consonant sounds associated with these oral postures.

In light of these observations, Fagan & Iverson (2007) reasoned that relative to vocalizations unaccompanied by object mouthing, vocalizations that co-occur with mouthing should be more likely to contain a supraglottal consonant and to contain a greater variety of consonant sounds. To address this prediction, they coded vocalizations for presence of at least one consonant and vowel. Consonants were further categorized as glottal (e.g. [h]) or supraglottal (e.g. [k], [d], [b]), and a supraglottal consonant inventory was compiled for each infant. Finally, vocalizations were classified on the basis of whether or not they were produced during mouthing of objects, hands or fingers.

Infants regularly vocalized while mouthing objects. On average, 28% of vocalizations produced during the observations occurred during instances of mouthing, and thirty-nine of the forty infants vocalized while mouthing. Thus, the co-occurrence of object mouthing and vocalization is a robust developmental phenomenon. And although the proportions of vocalizations containing a CV were similar for mouthing and non-mouthing vocalizations, vocalizations co-occurring with mouthing were significantly more likely to contain a supraglottal consonant and to include a greater variety of supraglottal consonants than those co-occurring with non-mouthing (though all were among those typically produced by young infants).

This pattern of results suggests that not only is object mouthing an effective mechanism of object exploration for infants aged 0;6 to 0;9, it may also play a role in infants’ exploration of their own vocalizations. Although infants undoubtedly explore vocalizations produced both with and without mouthing, mouthing may uniquely influence co-occurring vocalizations in a way that facilitates consonant exploration. Specifically, mouthing may bring about vocal tract closure and affect change in articulatory postures in association with object position, shape and movement. Moreover, the availability of multimodal feedback in mouthing vocalizations may encourage consonant exploration as infants vary routinely produced features of consonant articulation (i.e. place, manner and voicing).

Finally, there are data indicating links between characteristics of vocalizations and features of objects that are being concurrently manipulated. Bernardis, Bello, Pettenati, Stefanini and Gentilucci (2008) presented infants between the ages of 0;9 and 0;11 with small (2 cm) or large (4 cm) wooden objects one at a time. On each trial, an experimenter drew attention to the object, manipulated it and then placed it on the table in front of the infant. All vocalizations produced during object manipulation were recorded and spectrograms of these vocalizations were analyzed.

Findings indicated that when infants vocalized while manually manipulating objects, characteristics of those vocalizations tended to vary as a function of object size. Specifically, the first formant in the voice spectra (F1) was significantly higher for large relative to small objects. F1 is related to internal mouth aperture, with a higher value indicating a larger opening. In light of evidence indicating the existence from birth of a tight link between the manual and oral/vocal systems (see Bates & Dick, 2002 ; Iverson & Thelen, 1999 ), the authors interpreted these data as suggesting that when an infant prepares to manipulate a large object, the motor command to increase the opening of the fingers for large object manipulation is also sent to the mouth, resulting in a larger aperture that gives rise to the higher F1 values observed in co-occurring vocalizations. It is noteworthy that this effect is not limited to infants: a study of adults and older children revealed that execution of grasping influences the simultaneous pronunciation of syllables, such that when large objects are grasped, lip opening and F1 increased in a fashion that corresponded to changes in finger shaping during grasp movements ( Gentilucci, Santunione, Roy & Stefanini, 2004 ; Gentilucci, Stefanini, Roy & Santunione, 2004 ).

To summarize, developmental advances in motor skill in infancy create a broad range of novel experiences and opportunities for exploration that may have implications for language development. With the attainment of new postural and locomotor skills come opportunities for infants to experiment with vocal production in a different biomechanical configuration, gain experience with distal communication, and play an increasingly active role in the communicative process. All of these are relevant to the development of language. Furthermore, infants’ propensity to engage with and actively explore objects in the environment using hands and mouths may provide information not only about those objects, but about the infants’ own vocalizations. In short, as infants move through and engage with their surroundings (behaviors that are traditionally situated in the domain of motor development), these everyday activities and experiences have effects that extend beyond the motor domain to the developing communicative and language systems.

SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS

I began this review by noting that striking parallels exist in average ages of motor and language milestone achievement during the first year, but that correlational analyses of individual differences in ages of milestone achievement provide evidence against the notion that developments in these areas are simply a function of underlying neuromotor maturation. While this has sometimes been taken to imply that the development of motor skill is irrelevant to the emergence of language, I have argued against this view and for the claim that the developing motor system contributes to the development of language in at least two significant ways.

First, the acquisition of motor skills provides infants with opportunities to practice skills relevant to language acquisition before they are recruited for that purpose. The rhythmic hand and arm movements that emerge prior to reduplicated babble onset allow infants to practice rhythmically organized, tightly timed actions of the sort required for babbling. And prior to and during the period of first word onset, infants practice meaning making in action: they play with, manipulate and act on toys in progressively more specific ways; and, via gestural ‘naming’, they assign progressively more specific meanings to referents and extend common meanings across a variety of referents. All of these new forms of action – which are closely related to the emergence of early language milestones – are dependent on advances in motor skill.

Second, the emergence of new motor skills changes infants’ experiences with objects, people and their own bodies in ways that are relevant for both general communicative development and the acquisition of language. Unsupported sitting is related to changes in vocalization characteristics that appear to reflect exploration of the newly reconfigured vocal tract, expanded lung capacity and advances in speech timing; and the onset of independent locomotion provides infants with greater exposure to the problem of communicating about a distal referent with a distally located interlocutor. In addition, infants’ oral and manual manipulation of objects can shape co-occurring vocalizations, both by introducing variation into routinely produced features of vocalizations (e.g. through vocal tract closure and change in articulatory postures that occur during object mouthing) and through receipt of information about object size from the hands and fingers.

That motor development is not irrelevant to the acquisition of language, however, leads naturally and immediately to an important question and to two significant implications. The question is an obvious one: Are motor advances of the sort described here either necessary or sufficient for language development? The answer to this question, in my view, is an unqualified ‘no’ (see Campos et al . (2000) for a similar argument). The evidence reviewed here supports a role for motor development in language acquisition that might be best labeled ‘normally participatory’. All other things being equal, and given a typically developing child in a typical environment, motor development is a key participant in the process of language acquisition. That motor development is normally participatory, however, does not imply that it is necessary for language development. Nor does slow progress in motor achievement necessarily imply that language will develop at a similarly slow pace; there is undoubtedly a wide variety of alternative means for accessing the kinds of language-learning contexts that, in normative development, are provided by gains in motor skill.

Nor, obviously, is motor development sufficient for the emergence of language. If there is a single conclusion from the past fifty years of research on language development on which most everyone can agree, it is that the acquisition of language involves the coming together of a very broad array of abilities and skills. While motor development can be an agent of change for the developing language system, it should be obvious that the acquisition of language requires far more than simple growth in motor abilities.

That motor development is neither necessary nor sufficient for language development in the logical sense by no means minimizes its role in relation to the emerging language system. Indeed, lack of necessity and sufficiency is a central tenet of a systems approach to development, which explicitly rejects simple cause and effect models in favor of the notion that multiple and varying factors contribute to the emergence and development of a given behavior. Behavior and development, in other words, represent the confluence of multiple skills that are softly assembled as the child acts and interacts in a particular environment at a given moment in time (e.g. Thelen & Smith, 1993 ). On this view, motor skills are one among several sets of abilities that are involved in language; and although they are normally participatory in language development, should any given pathway be blocked, there is sufficient flexibility in the organization of the system to yield a myriad of possible (yet still normative) developmental trajectories leading to the emergence of language.

As to the implications of the view that motor development is normally participatory in the emergence of language, the first has to do with our thinking about the developmental origins of the now well-replicated finding that children with language impairments often exhibit motor difficulties (e.g. Bishop & Edmundson, 1987 ; see Hill (2001) for a review). This relationship has been interpreted as reflecting the fact that speech production and the kind of motor tasks that are typically employed in these studies (e.g. finger tapping) both involve precise timing of motor movements, and that the observed motor difficulties are more a reflection of difficulties with precise timing rather than problems with the motor system per se.

However, Bishop (2002) has pointed out that comparable difficulties are also apparent on other tasks that do not specifically require precise timing of movements (e.g. peg moving and gesture imitation tasks) ; instead, she has argued that co-occurring motor and language difficulties may have an underlying genetic basis, with the genes that put a child at risk for communicative impairment also affecting motor development. This view is supported by data from prospective studies of infants at risk for a variety of communication disorders, including autism spectrum disorders ( Iverson & Wozniak, 2007 ) and dyslexia ( Viholainen, Ahonen, Cantell, Lyytinen & Lyytinen, 2002 ; Viholainen, Ahonen, Lyytinen, Cantell, Tolvanen, & Lyytinen, 2006 ), for whom attainment of early motor milestones (e.g. independent sitting) lags behind that of no-risk comparison infants.

Delays in motor development have been traditionally conceptualized as indices of ‘delayed maturation’ or ‘neurological soft signs’, particularly when they co-occur with language difficulties; and indeed, motor difficulties are among the exclusionary criteria in widely used research definitions of specific language impairment (SLI; Leonard, 2000 ). The fact remains, however, that a substantial proportion of children with SLI exhibit co-occurring motor difficulties (e.g. Hill, 1998 ). The literature reviewed here suggests a possible developmental mechanism for this relationship.

Consider, for example, an infant aged 0;6, who has difficulty reaching for and grasping objects. As described above, object mouthing provides infants with information not only about objects, but also about their own vocalizations. An infant with limited ability to grasp objects and bring them to the mouth may therefore have more limited means (but certainly does not entirely lack the means) for exploring and learning about vocalizations, particularly those that involve vocal tract closure; and this might in turn influence that infant’s production and acquisition of supraglottal consonants. In other words, even a small distortion in a very basic and early emerging developmental skill – reaching and grasping – can have cascading effects in development that lead to disturbances extending beyond the motor domain (see Thelen (2004) for additional discussion). Since much of what infants do during the first two years of life involves moving through and acting on the environment, delays or deficits in motor skills may constrain the learning that takes place during these everyday activities.

The second implication of the argument developed here is methodological in nature. It is common in research on spoken language development for investigators to work with audiotaped language samples and/or language transcripts. For many purposes, this may be adequate; but I would like to encourage the field to make much greater use of video-recording. Videotaped data can be a source of important information not only about qualitative aspects of communication and language but about the movement context in which that language is produced, about what infants are doing while they are vocalizing, communicating or speaking.

Coding the movement context for language production allows for the observation of patterns not otherwise accessible. Thus, for example, although crawlers and walkers in the Karasik et al . (under review) study produced comparable numbers of social object-related bids at age 1;1, walkers produced significantly more moving bids than did their crawling age-mates. Since moving bids may elicit different patterns of response from parents, which could in turn impact infants’ language experiences, this is important information. Unfortunately, however, it is information that is lost unless attention is paid to what the child is doing at the time of the bid. Similarly, students of infant vocalization, who often audio-record infants as they play with soft, quiet toys chosen to reduce interference with the quality of the recording, would be advised to video-record as well and code the infant’s movements at the time of vocalization. Even soft, quiet toys are likely to be mouthed by infants. And because mouthing appears to influence consonant production, video-recording would provide additional, fine-grained information about the status of specific consonant sounds in the infant’s repertoire, i.e. whether they only appear in a more supportive context (when the vocal tract is blocked with a toy) or whether (and when) they emerge outside the context of mouthing. In short, whenever possible, language researchers should record and analyze the movement context of a child’s language production. This will not only reveal more about the relationship between motor development and language, it will provide critical information on the context in which changes in language come about.

In conclusion, I have suggested here that there is a relationship between motor development and language development, but it is complex and multi-faceted rather than simple and directional. The emergence and continued development of new motor abilities during the first eighteen months has far-reaching consequences that extend to other developing systems, including language. The developing motor system provides opportunities for practicing and refining skills that are crucial for language and for increasingly complex learning about speech sounds and meaning making. Studying the ways in which motor achievements contribute to the development of language may not only yield a more comprehensive picture of the emerging language system; it may also provide fundamental insights into the processes underlying this emergence.

Preparation of this article was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health (R01 HD54979). I am grateful to Erin Koterba, Meg Parladé and Nina Leezenbaum for discussion of many of the ideas presented here, to Robert H. Wozniak for extensive and insightful comments, and to Edith Bavin and two anonymous reviewers for helpful suggestions on previous versions of the manuscript. This article is dedicated to the memory of Michael M. Iverson.

Recognitory gestures have also been termed ‘symbolic play schemes’ (e.g. Inhelder et al ., 1971 ) and ‘gestural depiction’ ( Werner & Kaplan, 1963 ).

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