Vocal overimitation in preschool-age children

Abstract

Overimitation--copying incorrect, idiosyncratic, or causally irrelevant actions--has been linked to our species' long history with artifacts whose functions are often opaque. It is an open question, however, whether children overimitate outside the artifact domain. We explored this question by presenting preschool-age children (3- to 5-year-olds, N=120) with an elicited imitation task that included high- and low-frequency disyllabic nouns (e.g., 'pizza) and nonwords (e.g., 'chizza), all of which had a stressed first syllable. However, during testing, half of the stimuli were incorrectly pronounced by stressing the second syllable (e.g., pi'zza). More than half of the children copied the model's incorrect pronunciation of high-frequency familiar words, consistent with overimitation. This pattern of response persisted even after children had themselves correctly named the familiar words prior to the start of testing, confirming that children purposefully altered the pronunciation of known words to match the incorrect pronunciations used by a model. These results demonstrate that overimitation is not restricted to the artifact domain and might extend to many different tasks and domains.

‘Over-imitation’: A review and appraisal of a decade of research

“…Over-imitation: a review and appraisal measure the same phenomenon, such as studies which operationalized OI via alternative options to act, one of which is less efficient than the other. However, we believe that clarity is gained by specifying some core boundaries in what qualifies as an instance of OI; for example, that OI should be restricted to the action domain and not be extended to the vocal domain (Subiaul, Winters, Krumpak, & Core, 2016). Word learning and communication are so intrinsically conventional that any "transparency" of what might constitute an irrelevant aspect to copy must be intrinsically fuzzy or nonexistent.…”

“…A relatively new development is the expansion of the OI concept to the vocal or linguistic domain Subiaul, Winters, Krumpak, & Core, 2016). For example, Subiaul et al (2016) found that preschoolers adopted a model's unusual pronunciation in a word naming task and defined this vocal imitation as an instance of OI outside the artifact domain. As such findings do not meet our criteria for OI we will not discuss them further.…”

[Retracted] Monitoring and Model Analysis of Vocal Performance Teaching Environment Using Cluster Analysis from the Perspective of Core Literacy

“…DFSABC combines the educational value brought by the vocal music course with the vocal music practice. After investigation and analysis, it puts forward the strategy of implementing the core quality of students' development in the basic education stage [ 15 ]. Joer et al studied the connection between the core accomplishment and the singing teaching part of the junior high school vocal music course and considered that the “three-dimensional goals” of emotion, attitude, values, process and method, knowledge, and skills are the basis of the core accomplishment [ 16 ].…”

Developmental sociolinguistics: Children's acquisition of language variation

“…In fact, young children's heightened sensitivity to subtle pronunciation differences may be one reason why they have such difficulty at first in understanding novel accents (e.g., Nathan, Wells, & Donlan, 1998). Children may also be more motivated to imitate novel pronunciations than adults are (Subiaul, Winters, Krumpak, & Core, 2016).…”