Developmental Psychology Commons^™

Motor-Language Cascades: How Fine Motor Relates To Language Outcomes Across Early Development, Sandy Gonzalez

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The current dissertation examined the role of motor skills on children’s language outcomes across early development. For study one a systematic review was conducted to examine differences in how gross and fine motor skills foster language development from 0-5 years of age. Results based on 22 articles indicated that while both gross and fine motor skills are related to language outcomes, too few studies have measured fine motor skills to conclusively determine differences in how gross and fine motor skills differentially relate to language outcomes.

The aim of study two was to investigate whether gross or fine motor skills were …

The Development Of Spatial Vocabulary, Rosalie Odean

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Previous research has shown a link between the spatial words children use and their performance on spatial reasoning tasks. There is a dearth of measures of spatial language, especially those that focus on a specific type of word. This dissertation introduces three studies, using two measures of dimensional adjective comprehension, one in English and one in Spanish. Study one found that bilingual children’s knowledge of dimensional adjectives in one language is not predictive of their performance on dimensional adjectives in the other language, but that general vocabulary within a language predicts performance in that language. This study also showed that …