Walking, Exploration, and Language in High and Low Risk Infants

The development of walking provides infants with new opportunities for exploring the environment and interacting with objects and people; and these new opportunities in turn create contexts for the development of language and communication. Because we currently lack a detailed understanding of the way in which this complex series of events unfolds in typical development or of how delays in walking affects these events, this research will focus on how the development of walking influences infants' exploration and communication and adults' communication to infants, and how these changes in infant/adult communication impact children's later language skills. We will compare these developments in infants at heightened risk for developmental delay (infants with an older sibling diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder) to those in infants with no such risk as they grow from 6 to 36 months of age in order to provide information that will facilitate recognition of developmental delays and design of early intervention.