Effects of Delay Interval and Pictorial Cues on a Sentence Imitation Task

Abstract

40 preschool children performed a sentence imitation task under four conditions (10 subjects in each condition): immediate imitation of auditorily presented stimuli, delayed imitation of auditorily presented stimuli, immediate imitation of auditorily and pictorially presented stimuli, and delayed imitation of auditorily and pictorially presented stimuli. The subjects in the immediate imitation conditions produced fewer total errors and more verbatim responses than the subjects in the delay interval conditions. These findings are discussed in relation to prior findings.