Dataset Information

Reaching skills in six-month-old infants at environmental and biological risk.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

To assess kinematic parameters and proximal and distal reaching adjustments of infants at biological or environmental risk and compare with reaching performance of six-month-old full-term infants without known risk factors.

Methods

This blinded cross-sectional study included 62 infants at six months of age divided into three independent groups: Group with no known risk factor (NRF), 28 full-terms with no risk factors; Low SES group (LSES):19 full-terms classified as low socioeconomic status and no biological risk; Very preterm group (VPT), 15 very preterm infants at six months corrected age and no environmental risk. Infants were placed in a reclined baby chair at 45°, and a malleable and unfamiliar object was presented to the infant at 5-second intervals to elicit reaching movements.

Results

Infants from LSES presented reaching duration (p = 0.032, Cohen's f = 0.349) and movement unit (p = 0.033, Cohen's f = 0.351) significantly higher than VPT group. Horizontal hand orientation was moderately associated with infants at environmental risk (p = 0.031; Cramer's V = 0.30).

Conclusion

Infants of low socioeconomic status perform less functional reaching movements than very preterm infants at six months corrected age. Socioeconomic status may impact more on reaching skills than biological risk. Given the importance of reaching for infant development, low-cost public health strategies are needed to identify possible delays.

SUBMITTER: Araujo Rohr L

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8248732 | biostudies-literature | 2021

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Reaching skills in six-month-old infants at environmental and biological risk.

Araújo Rohr Liz L Cabral Thais Invenção TI Moraes Murilo Mageste de MM Tudella Eloisa E

PloS one 20210701 7

<h4>Objectives</h4>To assess kinematic parameters and proximal and distal reaching adjustments of infants at biological or environmental risk and compare with reaching performance of six-month-old full-term infants without known risk factors.<h4>Methods</h4>This blinded cross-sectional study included 62 infants at six months of age divided into three independent groups: Group with no known risk factor (NRF), 28 full-terms with no risk factors; Low SES group (LSES):19 full-terms classified as low ...[more]

PMID: 34197565

Similar Datasets

Project description:The past 5 years have witnessed claims that infants as young as six months of age understand the meaning of several words. To reach this conclusion, researchers presented infants with pairs of pictures from distinct semantic domains and observed longer looks at an object upon hearing its name as compared with the name of the other object. However, these gaze patterns might indicate infants' sensibility to the word frequency and/or its contextual relatedness to the object regardless of a firm semantic understanding of this word. The current study attempted, first, to replicate, in Norwegian language, the results of recent studies showing that six- to nine-month-old English-learning infants understand the meaning of many common words. Second, it assessed the robustness of a 'comprehension' interpretation by dissociating semantic knowledge from confounded extra-linguistic cues via the manipulation of the contingency between words and objects. Our planned analyses revealed that Norwegian six- to nine-month-old infants did not understand the meaning of the words used in the study. Our exploratory analyses showed evidence of word comprehension at eight to nine months of age-rather than from six to seven months of age for English-learning infants-suggesting that there are cross-linguistic differences in the onset of word comprehension. In addition, our study revealed that eight- to nine-month-old infants cannot rely exclusively on single extra-linguistic cues to disambiguate between two items, thus suggesting the existence of early word-object mappings. However, these mappings are weak, as infants need additional cues (such as an imbalance in frequency of word use) to reveal word recognition. Our results suggest that the very onset of word comprehension is not based on the infants' knowledge of words per se. Rather, infants use a converging set of cues to identify referents, among which frequency is a robust (pre-semantic) cue that infants exploit to guide object disambiguation and, in turn, learn new words.

Dataset Information

Reaching skills in six-month-old infants at environmental and biological risk.

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion

Publications

Reaching skills in six-month-old infants at environmental and biological risk.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets