Deferred imitation in 9- and 14-month-old infants: A longitudinal study of a Swedish sample

This study investigated deferred imitation using a longitudinal design. A total of 62 Swedish children (32 girls) were tested at both 9 and 14 months of age. The memory delay interval was 10 minutes at 9 months and five minutes at 14 months of age. At both ages children in the imitation group displayed significantly more target actions after modelling than the children in the control group, thus replicating earlier reports of imitation from memory. It was found that individual children with a tendency to perform low deferred imitation at 9 months of age tended to remain low on the test at 14 months, thus raising the possibility of stable individual differences in imitation. This study provides a first investigation of deferred imitation longitudinally among young children, and supports recent theoretical claims that deferred imitation arises earlier in ontogeny than was hypothesized by classical theory. It was observed that there are cultural differences in the way that Swedish versus American adult-infant pairs act in the test situation and ideas are offered regarding the roots of such differences.