The effect of context on verbal elicited imitation

Elicited imitation is a language sampling procedure in which a child is asked to repeat an utterance that is modeled by the examiner. In most clinical applications of this technique, the stimulus sentences are presented without any relevant context and without regard to whether the child knows the meaning of the sentences to be imitated. In the current experiment, 16 language-delayed preschool children repeated a set of 40 sentences, controlled for length, without context and with context provided by a set of pictures drawn to capture the meaning of the stimuli. For some of the children, the context had little effect. For the group as a whole, however, the number of errors was significantly reduced when the visual context was provided. These findings suggest that, for at least some children, the elicited imitation procedure is made more sensitive to the child's best grammatical performance when context is added.