Patterns of Gestural, Vocal, and Verbal Imitation Performance in Infancy.

Abstract

The influence on imitation of item familiarity or novelty, visibility or nonvisibility, and meaningfulness was studied with 42 infants, 10 through 16 months old. Their mothers presented them with 21 different items in six categories: meaning ful communicative gestures; similar hand and arm actions without communica tive significance; nonvisible items that the infants could not see themselves per form; object-related actions; vocalizations; and words. Imitation of meaningful gestures exceeded performance of actions and repetition of vocalizations sur passed imitation of words. Performance on novel and nonvisible behaviors was strongly age related. When the familiarity or novelty of individual items was taken into account, meaningful patterns of relationships were found for imitation of familiar gestures, actions, and vocalizations and for reproduction of novel vo calizations and/or words, actions, and nonvisible behaviors. The results were discussed in light of Uzgiris's (1981 ) conceptualization of two functions of imita tion during infancy.

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