Effectiveness of Motor Support Program in Multidimensional Development of Autistic Children.
Learning to walk does not naturally boost gestures or words in infants later diagnosed with ASD—plan to teach those skills directly.
01Research in Context
What this study did
The team watched 126 babies from 9 to 24 months. All learned to walk during the study.
Some babies later got an ASD diagnosis. Others had only a language delay. The rest were typical.
Every month the researchers counted each baby’s pointing, waving, and word-gesture combos. They asked: does walking spark more communication?
What they found
Typical babies pointed and waved more right after they walked. Language-delay babies did the same.
Babies who later got an ASD label did not. Their gestures stayed flat even though they could now walk.
Walking alone did not flip on social communication for the ASD group.
How this fits with other research
Iao et al. (2024) saw the opposite in older Taiwanese toddlers. When these kids with ASD learned to copy hand motions, their language jumped 18 months later. The new study shows the spill-over does not happen by itself in infancy; the 2024 study shows it can be taught later.
Scior et al. (2023) also found a link, but for fine motor skill, not walking. Tiny hand movements, not big steps, predicted clearer speech and longer sentences in preschoolers with ASD.
Setoh et al. (2017) warned us that early motor quirks often travel with ASD risk. The 2025 data now prove that one big motor win—walking—won’t fix the social gap without help.
Why it matters
If you serve infants with ASD, don’t wait for walking to “unlock” communication. Start gestures, joint attention, and imitation drills as soon as you see motor progress. Pair every new step with a social step: point to a toy, wave bye, show and name. Build the bridge early so the child does not stay silent on the other side.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
New motor skills can shape how infants communicate with their caregivers. For example, learning to walk allows infants to move faster and farther than they previously could, in turn allowing them to approach their caregivers more frequently to gesture or vocalize. Does the link between walking and communication differ for infants later diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), whose communicative and motor development differs from their neurotypically developing peers? We prospectively followed two groups of infants longitudinally during the transition from crawling to walking: (1) N = 25 infants with no family history of ASD; and (2) N = 91 infants with an older sibling with ASD. Fifteen infants were later diagnosed with ASD, and 26 infants showed a language delay (but did not receive an ASD diagnosis). After learning to walk, infants without ASD or language delay showed considerable changes in their communication: They gestured more frequently, and increasingly coordinated their gestures and vocalizations with locomotion (e.g., by approaching a caregiver and showing a toy). Infants with language delay showed similar but attenuated growth in their communication. However, infants later diagnosed with ASD did not display enhanced communication after they began to walk.
Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 2025 · doi:10.1007/s11920-021-01280-6