Imitation In Young Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Background:

Young children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulty imitating other people's actions. Impairments in imitation ability could negatively affect children's social-cognitive development, a specific area of concern for children with autism. Research is ongoing to determine the mechanism or specific deficit underlying imitation performance in children with ASD.

Objectives:

The objective of this study was to explore child characteristics and behaviors that may influence children's performance on imitation tasks.

Methods:

Fifty-five children were recruited from a suburban special-education public preschool. In this study, participants were analyzed in two groups: children with a clinical diagnosis of ASD (N=27) and children with other developmental delays (N=28). The children ranged in age from three to five years old and their mental ages ranged from 18 to 59 months. Child characteristics and demographics were not significantly different between the two groups. In this study, children were assessed using nine items from the Imitation Battery (Rogers, Hepburn, Stackhouse, & Wehner, 2003), which included 3 manual acts, 3 actions on objects, and 3 oral-facial movements. Additionally, children were also assessed on measures of joint attention and symbolic play.

Results:

Consistent with existing research, results indicate that compared to children with other developmental delays, children with autism completed fewer imitation tasks correctly, especially in imitating oral-facial tasks. However, a closer examination of child characteristics using analysis of variance procedures showed significant main effects of developmental scores as well as a significant interaction effect between disability group and developmental scores. While children with higher mental and language ages generally completed more imitation tasks successfully than children with lower developmental abilities, children with ASD showed a much greater disparity. Whereas children with higher developmental scores in both groups performed at similar levels, children with lower developmental scores in the ASD group failed significantly more imitation tasks than those children with other developmental delays. In addition, while preliminary results did not find significant groups differences in reversal errors and errors of style, results did indicate that children with ASD were less engaged with the experimenter and displayed fewer coordinated joint looks than the children with other developmental delays during the imitation battery.

Conclusions: 

Findings suggest that children with ASD may need more guidance in imitating oral-facial tasks than non-meaningful manual and object tasks when compared to children with other developmental delays. Additionally, interventionists may need to specifically target imitation skills for children with ASD with lower mental ages. Further investigation is needed to examine imitation ability in more natural settings.