Co-occurrence of early forms of vocal and motor actions in infants

The present study examined the co-occurrence of vocal and motor actions, in order to understand the nature of this link in typically developing infants using an event-based approach. Participants included nine infants who were longitudinally studied for 10 months, between 3 and 12 months of age. The infants were observed for four types of vocal behaviours (vegetative, vocalic, syllabic and verbal) and seven types of motor actions (hand, face, leg, head, torso, whole body and gaze) across three developmental time frames (3–5 months, 6–8 months & 9–12 months), and a measure of rate of co-occurrence was calculated. Results indicated that co-occurrence of vocal and motor actions was present from the young age of 3 months, with a possible change in the relationship as they grew older.