Determinants of Imitation of Hand‐to‐body Gestures in 2‐ and 3‐year‐old Children

Abstract

Twenty children, ten 2-year-olds and ten 3-year-olds, participated in an AB procedure. In the baseline phase, each child was trained the same four matching relations to criterion under intermittent reinforcement. During the subsequent imitation test, the experimenter modeled a total of 20 target gestures (six trials each) interspersed with intermittently reinforced baseline trials. In each session, target gestures were selected in a pre-randomized sequence from: Set 1-ear touches; Set 2-shoulder touches; Set 3-midarm touches; and Set 4-wrist touches; subjects' responses to targets were not reinforced. In each target set, half the gestures featured in nursery matching games and were termed common targets whereas the remainder, which were topographically similar but did not feature in the games, served as uncommon targets. The children produced significantly more matching responses to common target models than to uncommon ones. Common responses were also produced as mismatches to uncommon target models more often than vice versa. Response accuracy did not improve over trials, suggesting that "parity" did not serve as a conditioned reinforcer. All children showed a strong bias for "mirroring"-responding in the same hemispace as the modeler. The 2-yearolds produced more matching errors than the 3-year-olds and most children showed a bias for responding with their right hands. The strong effects of training environment (nursery matching games) are consistent with a Skinnerian account, but not a cognitive goal theory account, of imitation in young children.

The Impact of Body‐part‐naming Training on the Accuracy of Imitative Performances in 2‐ to 3‐year‐old Children

“…In the matching tests that followed baseline matching training and prior to the first round of tact training (i.e., across Test 1 sessions for the first pair of targets, and Test 1 and Test 2 for the second pair of targets), out of a total of 12 untrained target gestures across all 3 children, 6 were infrequently matched, and the remaining 6 were not matched at all. Our data show no evidence that repeated modeling of target gestures resulted in increased matching, which is consistent with our previous findings (Erjavec & Horne, 2008; Erjavec et al, 2009; Horne & Erjavec, 2007).…”

Comprehension and production of body part labels in 2‐ to 3‐year‐old children

“…It seems likely that body parts that commonly feature in social routines would be learned ahead of those that are not commonly touched or named. For example, Erjavec and Horne (2008) have reported that shaping of children's responses in social games and other interactions with caregivers correlates with the accuracy of children's body touch responses on an imitation task. In this study, 2‐ to 3‐year‐old children performed significantly more matching responses to target models that commonly featured in nursery matching games, than to target gestures that had no such learning history, even though the two sets of target hand‐to‐body touches were similar in terms of complexity and production difficulty.…”

Initial investigations into preschoolers’ mirror-style versus transposed bodily imitation.

“…When prompted simply to "do as I do," when no target was apparent (i.e., movements simply hovered over an area of the table), children tended to respond in the mirror style (but see Mizuguchi, Sugimura, Suzuki, & Deguchi, 2011). Similarly, Erjavec and Horne (2008) more recently reported a mirror-style bias in 2-and 3-year-olds when responding to modelled hand and arm movements.…”