The interrelationships between motor, cognitive, and language development in children with and without intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Motor, thinking, and language skills are locked together in kids with IDD, so blend all three in therapy.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Houwen et al. (2016) watched young children with and without intellectual or developmental disabilities.
They checked how closely motor skills, thinking skills, and language skills move together.
Kids were grouped by how much cognitive delay they had.
What they found
In children with IDD, the three skill sets were tightly glued together.
The tighter the glue, the bigger the cognitive delay.
Typical kids showed looser links among the three areas.
How this fits with other research
Laposa et al. (2017) saw the same tight motor-language link in autism, but only for fine motor skills.
Garrido et al. (2017) meta-analysis found early motor and language deficits in ASD siblings, backing the glue idea.
Varsamis et al. (2015) showed that older students with both severe motor and cognitive issues hold overly positive self-views, hinting that the tight glue may later shape self-concept.
Why it matters
If you treat a child with IDD, do not work on language alone.
Add fine motor games and cognitive puzzles in the same session.
The study says gains in one area should pull the other two along, giving you more bang for your therapy buck.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
It is generally agreed that cognitive and language development are dependent on the emergence of motor skills. As the literature on this issue concerning children with developmental disabilities is scarce, we examined the interrelationships between motor, cognitive, and language development in children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) and compared them to those in children without IDD. In addition, we investigated whether these relationships differ between children with different levels of cognitive delay. Seventy-seven children with IDD (calendar age between 1;0 and 9;10 years; mean developmental age: 1;8 years) and 130 typically developing children (calendar age between 0;3 and 3;6 years; mean developmental age: 1;10 years) were tested with the Dutch Bayley Scales of Infant and Toddler Development, Third Edition, which assesses development across three domains using five subscales: fine motor development, gross motor development (motor), cognition (cognitive), receptive communication, and expressive communication (language). Results showed that correlations between the motor, cognitive, and language domains were strong, namely .61 to .94 in children with IDD and weak to strong, namely .24 to .56 in children without IDD. Furthermore, the correlations showed a tendency to increase with the severity of IDD. It can be concluded that both fine and gross motor development are more strongly associated with cognition, and consequently language, in children with IDD than in children without IDD. The findings of this study emphasize the importance of early interventions that boost both motor and cognitive development, and suggest that such interventions will also enhance language development.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2016 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2016.01.012