The ability to understand others’ actions is central in human interaction. Experience producing actions, including the experience that goes with advances in motor development and the experience associated with short-term training, is associated with action perception in the first year of life. To date, it is unclear how these two different aspects of action experience interact in supporting action perception. In this dissertation, I investigate the behavioral and neural responses that are associated with advances in motor development and that result from the effects of short-term action training. In Study 1, I explore the potential interplay between these two aspects of experience in relation to action understanding, by evaluating infants’ motor development and the effects of action training on their behavioral response to another person’s action. The results replicate prior findings associating motor skill and short-term training with action perception. They further indicate a compensatory interaction between action training and motor skills--action training improved action understanding, particularly for those infants who started out with lower motor skills. In Study 2, I investigate neural correlates associated with infants’ perception of actions that are within versus outside the repertoire of actions they are able to produce. Clarifying mixed findings from prior research, I find that actions within the infants’ developmental repertoire are associated with specific neural correlates, including functional connectivity between motor and visual processes. In Study 3, I ask whether similar patterns of connectivity are evident during infants’ perception of a newly trained action, following an intervention designed to support infants’ pointing. While I do not find motor-visual connectivity modulated by intervention experience, I find an increase in global connections across the brain as a function of intervention, suggesting that prolonged experience may be necessary to reliably build on specific network activations. Taken together, this work suggests that the connection between action experience and action perception is associated with changes in dynamic network activity, and paves the way for developmental cognitive neuroscience research to investigate changes in functional neural networks that occur with experience and its implications on action perception.