Practice and proficiency: Factors that facilitate infant walking skill.

ABSTRACT: Infant walking skill improves with practice-crudely estimated by elapsed time since walk onset. However, despite the robust relation between elapsed time (months walking) and skill, practice is likely constrained and facilitated by infants' home environments, sociodemographic influences, and spontaneous activity. Individual pathways are tremendously diverse in the timing of walk onset and the trajectory of improvement, and presumably, in the amount and type of practice. So, what factors affect the development of walking skill? We examined the role of months walking, walk onset age, spontaneous locomotor activity, body dimensions, and environmental factors on the development of walking skill in two sociodemographically distinct samples (ns = 38 and 44) of 13-, 15-, and 19-month-old infants.

SUBMITTER: Hospodar CM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8550266 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature