Generalized Imitation within Three Response Classes in Typically Developing Infants

Poulson, Claire L.; Kyparissos, Nicholas; Andreatos, Maria; Kymissis, Effie; Parnes, Marie

doi:10.1006/jecp.2002.2661

Cited by 25 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Although verbal praise produces higher rates of vocal and action matching under controlled conditions (Poulson et al, 2002;Young et al, 1994), it was associated with imitation rates in only one of six correlational analyses. Maternal praise was positively related to infants' vocal/verbal matching rates at 21 months; the direction of effect, if any, however, cannot be determined.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…Although the frequencies and characteristics of children's initial spontaneous imitations of their mothers' behaviors have been described (Masur, 1987;Masur & Rodemaker, 1999), there have not been any previous systematic examinations of responses by mothers to their children's imitation during naturally occurring dyadic interactions. There have, however, been a few small-scale experimental investigations, with only 3 or 4 participants, demonstrating that adults' responsive praise can produce increased rates of vocal and action imitation in normal infants aged 1;0 to 1;2 and in young children with autism aged 2;11 to 4;5 (Poulson, Kyparissos, Andreatos, Kymissis, & Parnes, 2002;Young, Krantz, McClannahan, & Poulson, 1994). Whether mothers praise their typically developing infants' vocal/verbal or action imitations during natural interactions and whether praise, or any other maternal response, is related to children's imitativeness have not before been investigated.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Mothers’ and infants’ responses to their partners’ spontaneous action and vocal/verbal imitation

Masur

Olson

2008

Infant Behavior and Development

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Twenty mother-infant dyads (10 boys, 10 girls) were videotaped longitudinally at ages 10, 13, 17, and 21 months during in-home free play and bath sessions. Mothers' and infants' responses to their partners' naturally occurring action and vocal/verbal imitations were described, and relations to infants' imitation rates and vocabularies were examined. Mothers' response rates were consistently high and unrelated to infants' imitation rates. As early as 10 months, infants responded to the great majority of maternal imitations, especially action imitations, often with actions. Infants' return imitations to action matching indicated increasing awareness of being imitated. Infants' responses to mothers' vocal/verbal imitation were associated with their later vocabulary levels. Children who would be more lexically advanced at 17 and/or 21 months provided more social responses at 10 months, more socially responsive actions and return verbal imitations at 13 months, and more nonimitative socially responsive words at 17 and 21 months. Keywords imitation; mother-infant interaction; vocabulary; responses to imitationInfants' imitation has been proposed as a significant contributor to their cognitive and language development. Studies have found considerable variation in children's rates of elicited imitation during experimental tasks (e.g., Heimann, Strid, Smith, Tjus, Ulvund, & Meltzoff, 2006) as well as in their rates of spontaneous imitation, or "matching behavior" (Uzgiris, Benson, & Vasek, 1983, p. 1), occurring during natural dyadic interactions without direct elicitation (Hwang, & Windsor, 1999;Masur & Rodemaker, 1999;Snow, 1989). Such individual differences in vocal/verbal imitation rate are also associated with consequences for vocabulary acquisition, a critical measure of language development and a predictor of early literacy (Bornstein, Tamis-LeMonda, & Haynes, 1999). Several investigations have now demonstrated that infants who produce more vocal/verbal imitation during the second year have larger lexicons later on (Bates, Bretherton, & Snyder, 1988;Masur, 1995;Masur & Eichorst, 2002;Snow, 1989). Thus, factors that might influence children's imitation rates deserve investigation.One factor that merits examination is the kind of response children receive from their mothers after their imitations. Although the frequencies and characteristics of children's initial Corresponding author: Elise Frank Masur, Department of Psychology, Northern Illinois, University, DeKalb, IL 60115. email: efmasur@niu.edu;.. Publisher's Disclaimer: This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. Two other findin...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 96%

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confidence: 99%

Mothers’ and infants’ responses to their partners’ spontaneous action and vocal/verbal imitation

Masur

Olson

2008

Infant Behavior and Development

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Section: Is Vocal Imitation An Outcome Of Instrumental Conditioning?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In Baer and colleagues' generalized imitation framework, a vocalization is imitative if it occurs after a vocal act demonstrated by another individual, and if the form of the model's vocalization determines the form of the copier's vocalization. The proposal that generalized vocal imitation can be viewed as a consequence of operant conditioning has received some support from recent studies of the role of vocal imitation in speech development by children (Poulson, Kymissis, Reeve, Andreators, & Reeve, 1991;Poulson, Kyparissos, Andreatos, Kymissis, & Parnes, 2002).Collectively, past theoretical analyses of vocal imitation by experimental psychologists have often focused on establishing that this phenomenon can be viewed as an outcome of instrumental conditioning with few if any unique characteristics. These accounts generally do not explain why vocal imitation abilities are absent in most mammals.…”

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confidence: 99%

Imitating Sounds: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding Vocal Imitation

Mercado¹,

Mantell²,

Pfordresher³

2014

CCBR

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Vocal imitation is often described as a specialized form of learning that facilitates social communication and that involves less cognitively sophisticated mechanisms than more "perceptually opaque" types of imitation. Here, we present an alternative perspective. Considering current evidence from adult mammals, we note that vocal imitation often does not lead to learning and can involve a wide range of cognitive processes. We further suggest that sound imitation capacities may have evolved in certain mammals, such as cetaceans and humans, to enhance both the perception of ongoing actions and the prediction of future events, rather than to facilitate mate attraction or the formation of social bonds. The ability of adults to voluntarily imitate sounds is better described as a cognitive skill than as a communicative learning mechanism. Sound imitation abilities are gradually acquired through practice and require the coordination of multiple perceptual-motor and cognitive mechanisms for representing and generating sounds. Understanding these mechanisms is critical to explaining why relatively few mammals are capable of flexibly imitating sounds, and why individuals vary in their ability to imitate sounds. Keywords: mimicry; copying; social learning; singing; emulation; imitatible; convergence; imitativenessIn his seminal text, Habitat and Instinct, Lloyd Morgan (1896, p. 166) describes two general kinds of imitation: instinctive imitation and intelligent or voluntary imitation. The examples he provides of intelligent imitation mostly involve reproducing sounds-a child copies words used by his companions, a mockingbird imitates the songs of 32 other bird species, a jay imitates the neighing of a horse, and so on. In fact, most of the examples of "imitation proper" that Morgan provides consist of birds reproducing the sounds of other species. Similarly, Romanes (1884) focuses almost exclusively on reports of birds imitating songs, music, and speech in his discussion of imitation. These classic portrayals of vocal reproductions as providing the best and clearest examples of imitation stand in stark contrast to current psychological discussions of imitation, which often classify examples such as those given by Romanes and Morgan as non-imitative performances that merely resemble actual imitation (Byrne, 2002;Heyes, 1996). When did phenomena that were once considered archetypal examples of voluntary imitation transform into a footnote of modern cognitive theories? Was some discovery made that fundamentally changed our scientific understanding of the processes underlying vocal imitation? Have psychologists or biologists succeeded in explaining what vocal imitation is and how it works to the point where little can be gained from further study? Or, have theoretical assumptions led scientists to underestimate the cognitive mechanisms required for an individual to be able to flexibly imitate sounds?In the present article, we attempt to identify what exactly vocal imitation entails, and to assess whether current explanatory fr...

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“…Unfortunately, and despite this early lead in investigating how imitation is acquired and maintained in children, studies drawn from this body of research are rarely (if ever) cited in the cognitive developmental literature. These behavior analytic research findings, as reviewed by Baer and Deguchi (1985), and more recent studies in infants (Poulson, Kymissis, Reeve, Andreatos, & Reeve, 1991;Poulson, Kyparissos, Andreatos, Kymissis, & Parnes, 2002), suggest that children show rapid and untrained acquisition of matching relations, termed generalized imitation, from an early age. In the procedure employed to test for generalized imitation, children are first trained to match a number of baseline behaviors that are modeled by the experimenter, initially under continuous reinforcement, and then under intermittent reinforcement.…”

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confidence: 99%

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

Erjavec

Horne

2008

J Exper Analysis Behavior

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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.

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Generalized Imitation within Three Response Classes in Typically Developing Infants

Cited by 25 publications

References 16 publications

Mothers’ and infants’ responses to their partners’ spontaneous action and vocal/verbal imitation

Mothers’ and infants’ responses to their partners’ spontaneous action and vocal/verbal imitation

Imitating Sounds: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding Vocal Imitation

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

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