THE INTERPRETATION OF ELICITED SENTENCE IMITATION IN A STANDARDIZED CONTEXT

Abstract

Elicited imitation has been used to study language acquisition and ability, language disorders, and nonstandard dialects While it was initially assumed that elicited imitation reflected knowledge of grammar, later work suggests considerable variability in performance, e.g., children do not always imitate sentences they are known to have spontaneously produced at another time. This paper reviews research on elicited sentence imitation, distinguishing naturalistic and standardized applications of the technique. A six‐year program of research is summarized which suggests that elicited imitation in a standardized context yields highly stable individual difference scores, improvement with age in accuracy of imitation, superior performance by middle class students, correlations between “imitation” tests and natural environment language performances, significant correlations between elicited imitation and widely used tests of general verbalability, and statistical evidence that elicited imitation reflects knowledge of grammar, short‐term memory, and knowledge of vocabulary The inconsistency of child imitations noted by some researchers may be a function of age and nonstandardized observation procedures.