Yoga for Speech-Language Development

Yoga for Prelinguistic Communication 59

In terms of yoga poses, several, including boat, bound angle,
bridge, cobra, sphinx, and cat, are well suited for face-to-face
interaction, providing a context for the baby’s engagement with
their caregiver.
In boat pose (Figure 4.1a), the caregiver is seated on the
floor and the infant is positioned in the crook of the adult’s legs.
The adult can sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” while holding the
baby’s hands, which can be moved like oars. The repetitive,
rhythmical lyrics, coordinated with the movement, provide a joint
action routine for the caregiver-child social partners, what Bruner
(1983) called “formats,” which were introduced in Chapter 2.
In addition, the baby can lie prone on his caregiver’s lower legs
while  the caregiver holds both of the infant’s hands. Caregivers
can then extend their legs into a more challenging boat pose while
the baby moves up and down. During this joint action routine, the
caregiver can say “elevator up” or simply “up” and “elevator down”
or simply “down,” timing their linguistic input with the baby’s up
and down movements which facilitates language comprehension.
“Bumpin’ Up and Down,” a song popularized by Raffi, could also
be used in this context (Larson and Howard 2002).

Figure 4.1a Boat pose