LINKING HAND TO MOUTH THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN MANUAL DEXTERITY AND LANGUAGE SKILLS IN TYPICALLY-DEVELOPING CHILDREN

We investigated relationships between children's manual dexterity and language skills to examine the proposal that there are parallels between fine motor and speech development in typically-developing school-age children. Participants were 102 6-to 7-year-olds. We measured children's manual dexterity, auditory naming, and reading skills. Results showed that children's manual dexterity was related to their auditory naming latencies, but not to their reading skills. That is, children with more advanced manual dexterity also tended to have faster auditory naming latencies. The results provide new insight about the ways that hand processes and mouth processes may be related in typical development, and are consistent with the assumptions of the embodied cognition framework about links between action and language.