| dc.description | The purpose of this dissertation was to integrate and extend the findings of previous studies of gesture imitation in autism. Major issues were the specificity of deficient gesture imitation to autism, and the qualitative analysis of imitation performance. Participants were 20 children and adolescents with autism, 20 children with receptive language delays (matched to the autistic group for age and language level), and 20 normally-developing children (matched to the clinical groups for language level). Children were individually tested on their ability to imitate nonsymbolic (meaningless) and symbolic manual gestures, consisting of single nonsymbolic postures, sequences of nonsymbolic postures, object-related pantomimes, and communicative gestures. Control tasks for recognition and/or comprehension of the gestures, for object use, and for manual dexterity were employed. Gesture production was videotaped for blind scoring both of overall accuracy, and for specific errors. Consistent with previous research, the children and adolescents with autism in this study performed relatively poorly on gesture production and imitation tasks. A novel finding was that imitation of simple posture sequences was unimpaired. This study showed that problems with imitation in autism were not due to delayed receptive language skills, or to impaired gesture recognition or comprehension. It was also demonstrated that significantly reduced manual dexterity for the participant with autism contributed to, but did not account for, their praxic deficits. Most importantly, a distinctive pattern of imitative deficits was observed for the autistic group, in the presence of intact gesture recognition. It was argued that a common deficit affects imitation of both symbolic and nonsymbolic actions by individuals with autism, and that understanding of this impairment may have both theoretical and practical significance. | en_US |
