Effects of imitation on language comprehension and transfer to production in children with mental retardation

This study investigated the effects of verbal imitation on the comprehension of novel object-location responses and subsequent transfer of these responses to production. A matrix training procedure was used to teach 2 children with moderate mental retardation syntactic rules for combining known and unknown words into two-word utterances. An alternating treatments design was used with two conditions: receptive teaching with imitation of the target phrase and no imitation of the phrase. Findings suggested that the use of imitation facilitated both generalized receptive learning and transfer to production in both subjects.