# Walking, exploration, and language in high and low risk infants

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH AT PITTSBURGH · 2021 · $509,889

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
 The onset of walking and growth in social communication and language are likely to be intimately
connected. Advances in walking facilitate infants’ exploration of the environment and lead to alterations in
caregiver input; and these changes in turn provide expanded opportunities for the development of social
communication and language. Relative to crawlers, walkers have greater access to distal objects, explore the
environment more efficiently, move more with objects in hand, initiate social interaction more easily, and carry
objects to caregivers in communicative bids creating moments of shared attention during which caregiver
language input is likely to be maximally effective. Delays in the emergence and development of walking may
therefore reduce opportunities for exploration and social interaction and diminish rich caregiver input beneficial
for the growth of social communication and language. The purpose of this research is to conduct a detailed
examination of this unstudied developmental pathway by providing prospective, longitudinal data on the
emergence and development of walking, changes in locomotor exploration, advances in infant communication,
alterations in caregiver communicative input, and later developments in language from 6 to 36 months of age.
The study design involves intensive longitudinal observations that combine standard gait data with a rich array
of infant motor, exploration, and communicative behaviors and caregiver input to be coded from video. This will
permit close tracking of advances in walking, locomotor exploration, and infant and caregiver communication
and evaluation of their relationship to later child language outcomes. By comparing infants known to be at
heightened risk (HR) for motor and communicative delays (viz., infants with an older sibling diagnosed with
Autism Spectrum Disorder) to infants with no known risk (low-risk infants, LR), this research will yield a wealth
of data not only on fundamental developmental processes but on the effects of developmental delays during a
critical period in development. It will also yield a deeper understanding of the ways in which infant exploration
and communication and caregiver input change when infants begin to walk, and thus it will lay the groundwork
for the development of novel interventions that can be delivered early with the goal of enhancing social
communication and language outcomes in infants with early motor delays with a broad range of etiologies.
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## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10132293
- **Project number:** 5R01DC016557-04
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH AT PITTSBURGH
- **Principal Investigator:** Jana M Iverson
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2021
- **Award amount:** $509,889
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2018-04-01 → 2023-03-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10132293

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10132293, Walking, exploration, and language in high and low risk infants (5R01DC016557-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-23 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10132293. Licensed CC0.

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