Chuck B.
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I am trying to say something different, and its an iceberg of stuff...
[Remember the word kinesthetic is a term from developmental psychology years ago, before there was as much known about the function of various parts of the brain and development---so this term it is ambiguous and getting more so. Here's a wiki where another word is currently used, as Proprioception:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proprioception
I don't like the new word, because it doesn't stress motion as much and instead stresses proximity a more static concept. As I am finding out reading recent work, it's a lot more difficult to use words like instinct, innate, learned, and kinesthetic than we were taught in the waay back.]
I don't think individual babies re-invent walking. It's like they re-enact walking along a universal script. I think the developmental path together with its sequences and stages, that is its script, is universal. I think the kinesthetic system at birth is much more immature than in other primates, so it takes us hominids a lot more time and practice.
This is one reason why I want to make a distinction between imitative behavior (another iceberg of many qualifications and additions), and some other path of learning.
There is some developmental brain studies that I can't put my finger on at the moment that help explain this. The essential point is that the infant cerebellum which is usually thought of as part of a conscious directed integrator of the kinesthetic system hasn't matured into its full functional state at birth. It has to mature together with stimulus activity from the kinesthetic system and other senses. Here's the wiki on the cerebellum. (You don't have to read the whole thing. It goes on and on. Midway, there is diagram and a chart that sums up the relevant info)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebellum
Here's an interesting quote, I didn't know before:
``These observations and studies led to the conclusion that the cerebellum was a motor control structure.[1] However, modern research shows that the cerebellum has a broader role in a number of key cognitive functions, including attention and the processing of language, music, and other sensory temporal stimuli.[2]''
So what I think is going is a combination of an innate (as in brain)developmental path, within which all this kinesthetic activity and other sensory input helps wire up the underlying sensorimotor system.
In the early stages (month 1-3) there are a lot of motor reflex activities going on, until the cerebellum can start to suppress them and start to control, smooth, integrate the sensorimotor system that makes up what I called the kinesthetic system.
Meanwhile the motor cortex and more consciously directed activities are wiring up to the cerebellum, which in turn has now gained better control of the kinesthetic system (3-6 mons...I think). The whole process keeps developing together with other senses along with more and more consciously directed activities...
I was just reading this study a couple of days ago and now its mostly gone. It had a nice little chart that outlined the stages.
These medical studies of child brain development were very suggestive of Piaget's stages. Resource poor Piaget only had pencil, paper and long hours of watching and testing behavior. For people not familiar with Piaget and where I am coming from ... while headed somewhere else:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Piaget
Scroll down to Theoretical work and then read (1) Sensorimotor stage where 0 - 2yrs is broken down by stages.
So then going over this, I can see why Piaget and Chompsky along with most of the US linguistics clashed. You see it?
Piaget has said nothing about language learning development. Piaget's way of developing a transformational model of thinking and mind is not based on language, but behavior. Meanwhile US linguistics has dominated theories of language and mind and tried to found its transformation models on language, without consideration of other behavior.
In comes the anthropology, sociology, and psychology teams, with the evolutionary biologists, and we have a real food fight when they all clash at the cog sci neuroscience conferences...
Then there is the everything is number crowd like Lakeoff and Badiou.
CG