Search PubMed⌕ Search

SEARCH · Search PubMed

Results for “Imitative Behavior”

Search indexed PubMed citations on genomics, clinical trials, systematic reviews and public health. Explore titles, authors and supplied subject terms, then open the PubMed record.

Quote a phrase for an exact phrase match. Source license links do not imply unrestricted reuse.

At least 1,261 records · Page 70Linked to original sources
PubMed1990

Does imitation facilitate the acquisition of grammar? Evidence from a study of autistic, Down's syndrome and normal children.

This paper re-opens the question of whether imitation plays a significant role in the acquisition of grammar. Data for this study came from four samples of naturalistic mother-child speech taken over the course of one year from four autistic, four Down's syndrome and four normal children, covering a range of MLU stages. In general, autistic children used more formulaic language, including imitations, than Down's syndrome children, who in turn used more than the normal children. Comparisons of imitative and spontaneous corpora from the same transcripts were made using MLU and the Index of Productive Syntax. The main findings were that, with few exceptions, spontaneous speech utterances were longer, and contained more advanced grammatical construction than did the imitation utterances. These findings held across all three groups of subjects. We conclude that imitation does not facilitate grammatical development.

Autistic Disorder↗
PubMed1990

From one word to two words: repetition patterns on the way to structured speech.

This paper gives an account of the transition from one-word to multi-word utterances based on the productions of one child from age 1; 5.23 to 1; 8.15 in spontaneous interaction with her mother. The authors' interpretation of the observed development emphasizes: (1) the initial dissociation and later co-ordination of temporal chaining of elements on the one hand and meaning-relatedness between elements on the other; and (2) the psychological importance of repetition patterns for the change from single-word functioning to meaning-related and temporally-chained multi-word utterances, i.e. utterances that show the duality of patterning characteristic of human language.

Female↗
PubMed1990

Acquisition of passives: the role of patient animacy, salience, and lexical accessibility.

In full passive sentences such as The cat was kicked by the dog, the patient (cat) is promoted to subject and the agent is demoted to the by-phrase. Children 2;10 to 4;7 years (mean 3;6) who were taught the form with animate patients and animate agents (The baby is being picked up by the girl) were better able to produce and comprehend passives than children taught with inaminate patients and animate agents (The flower is being picked up by the girl). The finding of comparable post-teaching performance in children taught with perceptually salient (coloured) vs. nonsalient patients argues against a salience explanation for the patient animacy effect. Moreover, equal access to word forms for animate effect is inanimate nouns did not reduce the effect. The animacy effect is consistent with claims that 'perspective' is the cognitive counterpart to the formal category of subject; and, conversely, inconsistent with attempts to understand language acquisition in terms of a language system that operates in isolation from other facets of human cognition.

Child Language↗
PubMed1991

Representational demands in mothers' talk to preschool children in two contexts: picture book reading and a modelling task.

Shared book reading is considered to be an influential factor in language and literacy development and has been associated with more complex and demanding forms of tutorial language use. The present study seeks to examine mothers' discourse in joint picture book reading in terms of the level of representational demand which it places on the child, that is the extent to which it requires the child to engage in abstract thought. This was compared with the language used in another interactive, but more product oriented task, modelling a clown using play-doh. Twenty-four mother child dyads (in which the mean age of the children was 4;2) were videotaped while engaged on these tasks and the conversation was analysed for representational demand (levels of abstraction), interactive features and communicative function. The mother's conversation was found to be at a higher level of abstraction in reading than in play-doh modelling. The accuracy of child responses to high level requests for information was superior for reading, while responses to low level requests were similar in both situations. The interactive categories were more utterance-based and less attention-based than in the modelling task.

Attention↗
PubMed1990

The comprehension of metaphor by preschool children.

Comprehension of metaphor in preschoolers was studied through an elicited repetition task. Subjects were 52 children aged 3.0 to 5.2. Repetition performance on metaphors was compared to repetitions of semantically well-formed literal sentences as well as semantically anomalous sentences, all matched for length, vocabulary and sentence structure. Accuracy on literal and metaphoric stimuli was comparable, and both were significantly better than performance on anomalous sentences. There were no effects for age or sex. It was shown that the metaphors were not semantically anomalous to the children and that they were processed on a par with literal language. The argument is advanced from a review of the literature that imitation implicates understanding of the material imitated. If metaphor is thus shown to emerge early in the child's linguistic repertory, figurative language, it may be argued, occupies a more central position in linguistic theory than it has been accorded.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1989

Early bilingual development: one language or two?

It is commonly thought that children learning two languages simultaneously during infancy go through a stage when they cannot differentiate their two languages. Virtually all studies of infant bilingual development have found that bilingual children mix elements from their two languages. These results have been interpreted as evidence for a unitary, undifferentiated language system (the unitary language system hypothesis). The empirical basis for these claims is re-examined and it is argued that, contrary to most extant interpretations, bilingual children develop differentiated language systems from the beginning and are able to use their developing languages in contextually sensitive ways. A call for more serious attention to the possible role of parental input in the form of mixed utterances is made.

Child, Preschool↗
PubMed1992

Analysis of pronominal errors: a case-study.

The present paper reports a case-study of a normally developing boy who made pronominal errors for about ten months. Comprehension and production of first- and second-person pronouns were longitudinally examined from 1;7 to 2;10 to test three hypotheses concerning pronominal errors: pronominal errors are a result of either (a) semantic confusion, (b) simple imitation, or (c) confusion between self and others. The results showed that the child began using first- and second-person pronouns at about 1;8 and mastered the correct usage by 2;10. Consistent errors for the first- and the second-person pronouns were observed from 1;11 to 2;4, but proportions of errors occurring in his imitative language were low. The comprehension and production data clearly indicated that the child persistently made pronominal errors due to semantic confusion. That is, first-person pronouns referred to a person with whom the child conversed and second-person pronouns referred to himself.

Child Language↗
PubMed2005

Consonant-vowel co-occurrence patterns in Mandarin-learning infants.

Most studies on CV co-occurrence patterns in early phonetic development have been based on Indo-European languages. Data from infants learning Mandarin, which has a substantially different phonological system from Indo-European languages, can confirm or refute the findings of previous studies, thus shedding further light on the theoretical bases of CV association. Spontaneous vocalizations were recorded in 45-minute sessions for each of 24 Mandarin-learning infants aged 0;7 to 1;6. In addition, the speech production of 24 caregivers was audio-recorded during their natural daily interactions with the infants at home. Both infants' vocalizations and adults' speech were transcribed and analysed for consonant-vowel co-occurrence patterns. These patterns were similar to those in other language groups, but language-specific patterns were evident by 1;0. Combinations of alveolars+front vowels and velars+back vowels confirm Davis & MacNeilage's (1990, 1995) frame-then-content theory and Clements's (1991) model of unified features for consonants and vowels. However, our finding of a language-specific pattern (labials+back vowels) suggests the need to reexamine the 'pure frame' of Davis & MacNeilage and Clements's grouping of labials and rounded vowels.

Age Factors↗
PubMed2006

Direct object predictability: effects on young children's imitation of sentences.

We hypothesize that the conceptual relation between a verb and its direct object can make a sentence easier ('the cat is eating some food') or harder ('the cat is eating a sock') to parse and understand. If children's limited performance systems contribute to the ungrammatical brevity of their speech, they should perform better on sentences that require fewer processing resources: children should imitate the constituents of sentences with highly predictable direct objects at a higher rate than those from sentences with less predictable objects. In Experiment 1, 24 two-year-olds performed an elicited imitation task and confirmed that prediction for all three major constituents (subject, verb, direct object). In Experiment 2, 23 two-year-olds performed both an elicited imitation task and a sticker placement task (in which they placed a sticker on the pictured subject of the sentence after hearing and imitating the sentence). Children imitated verbs more often from predictable than unpredictable sentences, but not subjects or objects. Children's inclusion of constituents is affected by the conceptual relations among those constituents as well as by task characteristics.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1997

Deficits, delays, and distractions: an evaluation of symbolic play and memory in children with autism.

Two experiments were conducted to evaluate symbolic-deficit and memory-deficit hypotheses to account for the cognitive problems seen in children with autism. Experiment 1 tested imitation, in immediate and deferred conditions, of familiar actions with different sets of objects representing the developmental progression from functional to symbolic play. The results showed that the autism group and both their receptive language and nonverbal IQ-matched controls imitated familiar actions with realistic objects (evidence for functional play) and placeholder objects (evidence for symbolic play) after delays ranging from 24 hr to 3 weeks. Experiment 2 tested familiar three-step event sequences in which a placeholder object was substituted for the second step in half the events. The results showed that the autism group remembered as many of the actions with the placeholder objects as their language-matched controls and as many correctly ordered sequences, a finding that supports a symbolic-delay (rather than deficit) hypothesis. These results were obtained in highly structured test situations and sharply contrast with the impairments seen in children with autism who are observed in naturalistic settings. Two interpretations of these findings are offered. First, structured test settings minimize distractions that typically occur in naturalistic settings that may interfere or disrupt symbolic play in children with autism. Second, the results are consistent with an executive function deficit in that the autistic group demonstrated more knowledge in the test settings than they demonstrate spontaneously in naturalistic ones.

Attention↗
PubMed2006

Developmental dyspraxia is not limited to imitation in children with autism spectrum disorders.

Impaired imitation of skilled gestures is commonly reported in autism. Questions, however, remain as to whether impaired imitation is associated with a more generalized deficit in performance of gestures consistent with a dyspraxia and whether the pattern of errors differs from that observed in typically developing children. To address these questions, praxis in 21 high-functioning children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) was compared with 24 typically developing controls using a traditional approach in which performance was evaluated through detailed examination of error types. Children with ASD produced significantly fewer correct responses not only during Gesture to Imitation, but also during Gesture to Command and with Tool Use. The pattern of errors in ASD was similar to that of controls with spatial errors being most common in both groups; however, body-part-for-tool errors were more common in children with ASD, suggesting dyspraxia is not entirely attributable to motor deficits. The findings suggest that autism is associated with a generalized praxis deficit, rather than a deficit specific to imitation. In a developmental disorder such as autism, the findings may reflect abnormalities in frontal/parietal-subcortical circuits important for acquisition (i.e., learning) of sensory representations of movement and/or the motor sequence programs necessary to execute them.

Apraxias↗
PubMed2004

The evolution of learning.

Most processes or forms of learning have been treated almost as special creations, each as an independent process unrelated to others. This review offers an evolutionary cladogram linking nearly one hundred forms of learning and showing the paths through which they evolved. Many processes have multiple forms. There are at least five imprinting processes, eleven varieties of Pavlovian conditioning, ten of instrumental conditioning, and eight forms of mimicry and imitation. Song learning evolved independently in at least six groups of animals, and movement imitation in three (great apes, cetaceans and psittacine birds). The cladogram also involves at least eight new processes: abstract concept formation, percussive mimicry, cross-modal imitation, apo-conditioning, hybrid conditioning, proto-pantomime, prosodic mimicry, and image-mediated learning. At least eight of the processes evolved from more than one source. Multiple sources are of course consistent with modern evolutionary theory, as seen in some obligate symbionts, and gene-swapping organisms. Song learning is believed to have evolved from two processes: auditory imprinting and skill learning. Many single words evolved from three sources: vocal mimicry, discrimination learning, and abstract concept formation.

Animals↗
PubMed2002

Notation systems for transcription: an empirical investigation.

A 21-syllable question posed by Bernard Shaw in a CNN television interview with Margaret Thatcher was presented to 90 participants, either as an audio recording or as a typed transcript or as both. Participants were asked to speak it, as closely as possible, as Shaw had (or, in conditions without the audio recording, as he might have). The typed version was either an ordinary transcript or a transcript in one of three transcription systems used currently in research on spoken discourse, all of which incorporate notations for prosody. Hence, there were nine conditions in all, with five women and five men in each. Contrary to the experimental hypothesis, approximations to Shaw's original temporal measures of performance were not degraded but were instead improved significantly by the addition of a prosodically notated transcript to the audio recording and significantly more in the absence of the audio recording. Presentation of the ordinary transcript alone produced the worst approximation to Shaw's temporal measures. The usefulness, accuracy, and readability of transcripts prepared according to detailed notation systems are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Motor imitation in young children with autism: what's the object?

Two studies investigated the nature of motor imitation in young children with autism. Study 1 compared different types of motor imitation in 18 autistic children, 18 children with developmental delay, and 18 normally developing children. Results revealed weaker imitation skills for the autistic group, though all groups demonstrated a similar pattern of performance across different imitation domains. Imitation of body movements was more difficult than imitation of actions with objects, and imitation of nonmeaningful actions was more difficult than imitation of meaningful actions. Study 2 investigated concurrent and predictive relations between imitation and other developmental skills within a sample of 26 two-year-old children with autism. Results suggested that imitation of body movements and imitation of actions with objects represent independent dimensions. Imitation of body movements was concurrently and predictively associated with expressive language skills, and imitation of actions with objects was concurrently associated with play skills. Improvements in both motor imitation domains occurred over a 1-year period.

Analysis of Variance↗
PubMed1997

Spontaneous imitation of fundamental frequency and speech rate by nonstutterers and stutterers.

Speech can be described either in terms of acoustics, as a perceptual outcome, or as a motor event. Central to theories of speech perception and production is an attempt to describe how these aspects of speech are interrelated. The present experiment investigated how the nonstutterers' and stutterers' reproductions of acoustically presented interrogative sentences were influenced by experimental variations of intonation (sentence initial vs. sentence final) and speech rate (normal vs. time compressed). We studied the effects of these stimulus manipulations on the speech rate and fundamental frequency (F0) of 10 adult German-speaking nonstutterers and seven stutterers. Experimental manipulations of intonation and speech rate significantly influenced the syllable duration and speech rate of both normal speakers and stutterers. The fundamental frequency of the subjects' responses were also significantly influenced by the intonation of the stimulus. But the stutterers' increase in F0 for stressed syllables was generally less pronounced than that of nonstutterers. These results imply that (a) the subject not only extract linguistic meaning from intonation but that they also store extragrammatical speech rate information, and (b) the speakers adopt these speech rate variations for their own productions. Generally, these results demonstrate that speech perception is not limited to extracting linguistically invariant information. The results show that speakers actively generate their own prosody and that this generative process is influenced by the prosodic structure of another speaker's antecedent speech. The implications of these results for theories of speech production are discussed.

Adult↗
PubMed1997

Imitation of pretend play acts by children with autism and Down syndrome.

Although there has recently been considerable research interest in the difficulties that children with autism have engaging in pretend play, little attention has been paid to the ability of these children to imitate pretend play acts. Furthermore, suggestions that children with Down syndrome have relatively advanced abilities in pretend play have not been accompanied by an examination of their capacity to imitate pretend play. Three groups of children: autistic, Down syndrome, and normally developing were studied for their capacity to imitate single pretend acts and a series of pretend acts that formed scripts. While the children with autism were surprisingly better than the other two groups on the single-scheme task, they demonstrated specific difficulties on the multischeme task. Results are discussed in relation to current theories of autism and the notion of imitation.

Adolescent↗