OBJECTIVES We examined the associations of breastfeeding initiation and duration with language and motor skill development in a nationally representative sample of US children aged 10 to 71 months. METHODS Using cross-sectional data on 22399 children from the 2003 National Survey of Children's Health, we examined relationships between breastfeeding practices and children's language and motor ...

the main purpose of this study was to determine which correlate, perceived motor competence or motor skill competence, best predicts girls' physical activity behavior.a sample of 352 girls (mean age=8.7, sd=0.3 yr) participated in this study. to assess motor skill competence and perceived motor competence, each child completed the test of gross motor development-2 and physical ability sub-scale...

Why are performance trade-offs so rarely detected in animals when their underlying physiological basis seems so intuitive? One possibility is that individual variation in health, fitness, nutrition, development or genetics, or 'individual quality', makes some individuals better or worse performers across all motor tasks. If this is the case, then correcting for individual quality should reveal ...

Transfer (i.e., the application of a learned skill in a novel context) is an important and desirable outcome of motor skill learning. While much research has been devoted to understanding transfer of explicit skills the mechanisms of skill transfer after incidental learning remain poorly understood. The aim of this study was to (1) examine the effect of practice schedule on transfer and (2) inv...

Children with Down's syndrome have developmental delays, particularly regarding cognitive and motor development. Fine motor skill problems are related to motor development. They have impact on occupational performances in school-age children with Down's syndrome because they relate to participation in school activities, such as grasping, writing, and carrying out self-care duties. This study ai...

PURPOSE To examine how language production interacts with speech motor and gross and fine motor skill in children with specific language impairment (SLI). METHOD Eleven children with SLI and 12 age-matched peers (4-6 years) produced structurally primed sentences containing particles and prepositions. Utterances were analyzed for errors and for articulatory duration and variability. Standard m...

Despite the comorbidity between motor difficulties and certain disabilities, limited research has examined links between early motor, cognitive, and social skills in preschool-aged children with developmental disabilities. The present study examined the relative contributions of gross motor and fine motor skills to the prediction of improvements in children's cognitive and social skills among 2...

the purpose of this study was the effect of time of training and first night of sleep on implicit (accuracy) and motor (timing) components of timed motor sequences task (tmst) enhancement. forty-eight right-handed students (19-25 years old), who have had adequate sleep quality, were divided into three equal groups according to purdue hand and fingers' fine motor skills test and simple reac...

Surgical skill training is a long and tedious process of acquiring fine motor skills. To overcome the drawbacks of the existing toolbox trainer systems, we develop, for the first time, a virtual basic laparoscopic skill trainer (VBLaST) whereby tasks, such as the ones available in the FLS toolbox system, may be performed on the computer.