An analysis of elicited imitation as a language evaluation procedure

Two aspects of elicited imitation procedures, the relationship between imitation and spontaneous performance and the effect of nonlinguistic context, were examined using seven normal preschool children. The children performed two tasks: (a) they participated in a conversation with an adult and (b) they imitated 80 sentences controlled for length and structure while viewing a videotape depicting four types of nonlinguistic contexts. The results indicated that elicited imitation performance did not accurately predict spontaneous speech performance and that the addition of nonlinguistic context cues did not significantly effect the accuracy of imitation. The implications of these findings to clinical procedures are discussed.