Over recent decades much research has analyzed the relevance of 9- to 20- month-old
infants’ early imitation skills (object- and language-based imitation) for language development. Yet there have been few systematic comparisons of the joint relevance of these
imitative behaviors later on in development. This correlational study investigated whether
multimodal imitation (gestural, prosodic, and lexical components) and object-based imitation are related to narratives and sociopragmatics in preschoolers. ...
Over recent decades much research has analyzed the relevance of 9- to 20- month-old
infants’ early imitation skills (object- and language-based imitation) for language development. Yet there have been few systematic comparisons of the joint relevance of these
imitative behaviors later on in development. This correlational study investigated whether
multimodal imitation (gestural, prosodic, and lexical components) and object-based imitation are related to narratives and sociopragmatics in preschoolers. Thirty-one typically
developing 3- to 4-year-old children performed four tasks to assess multimodal imitation,
object-based imitation, narrative abilities, and sociopragmatic abilities. Results revealed that
both narrative and sociopragmatic skills were significantly related to multimodal imitation,
but not to object-based imitation, indicating that preschoolers’ ability to imitate socially
relevant multimodal cues is strongly related to language and sociocommunicative skills.
Therefore, this evidence supports a broader conceptualization of imitation behaviors in the
field of language development that systematically integrates prosodic, gestural, and verbal
linguistic patterns.
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