Elicited imitation paradigm

[Brian MacWhinney]

Dear Liam,
     Unsurprisingly, there is some controversy on the subject of elicited imitation as a method, but my own research and reading suggests that it is fully appropriate for any age group after about 24 months.  It is widely used with adults in clinical studies.  The ability to repeat long passages can also be viewed as a component of measures of working memory that are uniformly used with normal adults.  
   The idea that elicited imitation involves mere parroting has been consistently debunked.  For second language, Erlam has a nice study on this and I have done some forthcoming work with a grad student showing that repetition requires comprehension or at least adequate parsing.  A full discussion of this literature would take up several additional paragraphs and your question was simply about whether there is some upper age limit.  To that I would say no.
   However, it may be that you are asking something different. Consider a sentence such as "I tie my laces before I put on my shoes".  Children could easily repeat this, but then you might ask whether it makes sense and they might say yes, indicating that they hadn't comprehended fully. Is that what you are after?

--Brian MacWhinney

On Mar 8, 2013, at 12:31 PM, Liam Blything <liamblything at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> Can anyone give me some advice on what age-groups are too old for an elicited imitation paradigm? I have read that 4 years old is quite an old age to use this paradigm, but other studies have used it up to 7 years old.
> 
> I am eliciting two clause sentences linked by a connective (before, after). When do children become at high-risk for simply 'parrotting' the target sentence?
> 
> Many thanks for any thoughts,
> 
> Liam Blything
> Lancaster University PhD student.
> 
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