Toddlers whose speech is delayed also tend to exhibit impaired fine-motor skills, according to a new study of 54 American and Israeli children, ages 24 to 36 months, which was published in the American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology.

The lead study author, Shari DeVeney, a speech-language pathologist and professor at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, told JNS that she and her colleagues opted to study American and Israeli toddlers because they speak such different languages.

“The comparison between English and Hebrew was an interesting one, as these languages are so dissimilar across linguistic form domains including their associated speech sounds (phonology), rules for word construction (morphology) and rules for sentence structure (syntax),” she said.

Distinct U.S. and Israeli cultures also “provided a wonderful opportunity to explore ways in which early skill development could be shaped by cultural-environmental influences,” DeVeney told JNS.

She added that there is limited data available to researchers about the development of language skills and behavior in toddlers. “Since we had already established connections between our research teams in both countries, this seemed like a strong foundation for reliable data collection and analysis to examine the universality of the relationship between these important developmental domains,” she said.

DeVeney and her four co-authors—who are on the faculty at Bar-Ilan University and at the Levinsky-Wingate Academic College in Tel Aviv—sought to exclude toddlers who appeared likely to have autism, or other developmental disorders, from the study group. Of the 54 toddlers they studied, 16 were American English-speakers and 38 were Israeli Hebrew-speakers, and 23 of the 54 had language delays.

“We purposely wanted to study toddlers, who were unlikely to be later diagnosed with autism so that we could better determine the early relationship between motor and language domains in relative isolation and without the possible confounding influence of more global domain deficits like those associated with autism,” she said.

The most surprising finding for DeVeney and her colleagues was the “differences in skills and task performance across participants in the two countries.”

“We were not really expecting to find many cross-cultural differences. However, we found that our participants from the Israeli sample had better fine-motor skills than our participants from the American sample,” she told JNS, “further, that our American participants had overall higher error rates and were slower to perform the non-symmetrical block insertion task associated with our study than our Israeli participants.”

The researchers asked the toddlers to insert wooden blocks, which were not symmetrical and required rotation for correct positioning, into their correct slots on a larger block, or “shape sorter.” The toddlers were called upon to achieve 12 correct insertions per visit, across three sessions with the same non-symmetrical shape, and a different “transfer” with a new asymmetrical shape. (All the trials took place in their homes.)

The scholars don’t want to overstate the findings in a “relatively-small sampling of toddler participants, particularly our U.S. sample,” DeVeney told JNS. “But they certainly would be interesting to explore further.”

The differences between U.S. and Israeli toddlers in the study might be due to “parenting styles, early childcare environments and degree of participation in daycare outside of the home,” DeVeney told JNS.

“It’s hard to say at this time exactly what influenced the differences, but hopefully through more research we can begin to better understand why the differences were observed, and if these differences continue to be observed in other studies,” she said.

“By comparing these two linguistically and culturally different groups of toddlers, we hope to show how environmental factors may be related to early development and eventually offer insights into types of activities and interventions that could be most effective in different contexts,” DeVeney added.

Children learn new skills, including motor movements, at uneven paces, according to DeVeney. At first, they improve at a rapid clip, but as time goes on, they need to practice more to continue improving.

“This happens because the brain takes time to fully store the new skill, often showing better results hours or even a day after practice,” she told JNS. “This process also helps with learning language.”

Young kids with developmental language disorder “have trouble learning new motor skills and do not remember them as well as their peers,” she said. “In fact, many of them are slower to learn things like crawling, for example, compared to other children their age.”

Difficulty with a type of recall called “procedural memory” may account for that, according to DeVeney.

Procedural memory “helps us learn skills through practice, like riding a bike or learning how to speak accurately,” she said. “This memory system is important for both motor and language development. Researchers found that children with developmental language disorder often have differences in a part of the brain called the ‘basal ganglia,’ which helps with learning skills through repetition.”

JNS asked DeVeney what parents and educators ought to take away from the new research that she and her colleagues published.

“In our study we found that 2-year-olds, even with different language abilities, can learn a motor task like placing non-symmetrical blocks into corresponding slots,” she said. “But children with weaker language skills may have more trouble transferring what they learn to new contexts, which is similar to challenges seen in older children with language difficulties and supports the idea that language and motor skills are closely connected.”

A young child who has difficulty with either motor or language skills should be evaluated for both, DeVeney said.

“Since early motor delays might be linked to late talking, it’s important to develop new ways to teach and support young children,” she told JNS. “Parents, teachers and professionals can use these strategies to help children grow in both areas.”

(JNS)