You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The role of imitation in language acquisition is examined, including data from the psycholinguistic, operant, and social learning areas. From the psycholinguistic data, four empirical statements have been extracted: (1) there is no evidence that spontaneous imitations of adult speech influence grammatical development; (2) imitation of speech does not appear to occur with frequency beyond age three; (3) speech and hence imitation are not necessary for the comprehension of linguistic structures; and (4) most utterances of a child are novel and therefore could not have been exactly modeled. The first and second propositions are seen to be based on a too restrictive definition of imitation—immediate and exact copying. Selective imitation—a functional relationship involving similarity of a particular form or function of the model's responses—is proposed as an alternative, thus leaving the validity of statements (1) and (2) in question. Concerning assertion (4), certain data from the operant literature are presented as evidence of the compatibility of novel responding and modeling, imitation, and reinforcement. Finally, it is proposed that statement (3) suggests a mechanism by which selective imitation can be understood. A three-stage process is proposed in which comprehension of a grammatical form sets the stage for selective imitation of that structure, which leads in turn to spontaneous production. Thus imitation is a process by which new syntactic structures can be first introduced into the productive mode.