| dc.description | In this dissertation I provide a comprehensive description of imitation in a large sample of 9-month-olds, and I examine the prediction of imitation abilities at 9 months from performance on both social and non-social tasks at 4 months. Participants were 90 typically-developing infants and their parents who were seen at 4 and 9 months (77 families returned at the 9-month visit). Infants' imitation abilities were assessed within three contexts: (1) an elicited imitation task (vocal, gesture, object imitation with experimenter and parent), (2) spontaneous imitation during free play with their parents, and (3) parent report (ratings of infants' starting to copy and their sensitivity to being imitated). Predictor variables at 4 months included visual-spatial attention, visual-proprioceptive intermodal processing, maternal and infant play behaviours, and temperament. Concurrent relationships with imitation were also examined at 9 months; measures of joint attention were added to the other predictor variables. Consistent with previous research, infants as a group imitated actions on objects more frequently than gestures or vocalizations. However, considerable individual differences in imitative behaviour were noted. The current findings provide the first rich description of partial imitative behaviour at 9 months, and demonstrate that there is marked regularity in the behaviours that precede accurate action-copying. Relationships between imitative skill and sensitivity to being imitated indicate that these aspects of imitative behaviour during infancy share underlying mechanisms. An unexpected finding was that temperament emerged as the strongest predictor of imitative skill, whereas relationships with other predictor measures were not as strong as expected. Some of these associations might become more apparent in the second year, revealing differences between mechanisms that underlie higher levels of imitative behaviour, versus the early form of imitation examined in this study. The present results suggest avenues for future research, including implications for the study of developmental psychopathology. | en_US |
