Imitation therapy for non-verbal toddlers

Abstract

When imitation skills are not present in young children, speech and language skills typically fail to emerge. There is little information on practices that foster the emergence of imitation skills in general and verbal imitation skills in particular. The present study attempted to add to our limited evidence base regarding accelerating the development of speech/language in young children who have failed to achieve expected language milestones. Imitation therapy (Zedler, 1972) was utilized for five non-verbal 18-19-month-old children to determine if imitative behavior in the form of sound production could be initiated and increased. Treatment was administered until children reached criteria for consistent imitative sound productions. Following 8-9 weeks of therapy, all five children exhibited significant increases in both the number of vocalizations and the variety of phonemes produced, and they demonstrated regular spontaneous verbal imitation and emergence of phonetically consistent forms. Imitation therapy appears to be a promising practice that merits further investigation.

Parenting Supports for Early Vocabulary Development: Specific Effects of Sensitivity and Stimulation through Infancy

“…Between 12 and 18 months, length of infant-adult joint attention and adults' sensitive use of object labeling-in response to child interests within the context joint attention-predict novel word learning and overall vocabulary toward the end of the second year (Tamis-LeMonda et al, 2001;Tomasello & Farrar, 1986;Tomasello & Todd, 1983). However, after 18 months, as children's own skills for social referencing, imitation, and following others' attention increase, children become more skilled at learning new words from a variety of contexts (e.g., Gill, Mehta, Fredenburg, & Bartlett, 2011). Both 18-and 24-month-olds can learn some novel words by simply overhearing them (Gampe et al, 2012;Scofield & Behrend, 2011), although 24-month-olds are more flexible in this ability than 18month-olds (Callanan, Akhtar, & Sussman, 2014).…”

“…Further, even 3‐year‐old children learn novel words more readily when they are connected to children's personal interests (Kucirkova, Messer, & Sheehy, ). Therefore, although there is always a role for parental sensitivity in children's vocabulary acquisition (Landry et al., ), the social skills that grow markedly after 1 year enable children to learn new words more flexibly (e.g., Gill et al., ), possibly making sensitivity less necessary as a support for language learning. Thus, we expect that parental sensitivity will be supportive of children's vocabulary throughout the first 3 years, but that its effect may diminish after 1 year.…”

The Effect of Robot-Child Interactions on Social Attention and Verbalization Patterns of Typically Developing Children and Children With Autism Between 4 and 8 Years

“…TD infants learn to imitate their caregiver's actions on objects during shared attention episodes as early as nine months [40]. Infants typically learn their first words through imitation of gestures and words [41]. Children with ASDs demonstrate impairments in the imitation of orofacial, manual and gross motor actions [42].…”

“…Specifically, imitation of body movements at two years correlated with expressive language skills at three years [44], and object imitation skills correlated with joint attention skills of children with ASDs [40]. Moreover, imitation-based interventions have been used to facilitate language skills in children with autism [41]. Hence, the present study used an imitation game to facilitate interactions between a child, robot and the adult trainer.…”