FORMS OF EARLY WALKING

Children in the first weeks of independent locomotion display a wide v ariety of walking forms. The walking forms differ in mechanical strate gy and concern with balance. Three extreme walking forms are presented : the Twister, who uses trunk twist, the Faller, who uses gravity, and the Stepper, who remains balanced as much as possible. Each walking f orm is presented as a ''d-space'', a mathematical format combining con tinuous and discrete aspects, developed to express the sequence and pa ttern of a movement without the inappropriate precision of a physical trajectory. The three d-spaces represent analyses of three extreme mod es of early walking. They are used to generate the variety of early wa lking forms and to predict mixtures of mechanical strategies as childr en mature and converge to more similar walking forms over the first fe w months of independent locomotion. (C) 1995 Academic Press Limited