What’s so special about verbal imitation? Investigating the effect of modality on automaticity in children

• We investigate three accounts of why verbal imitation is easy for children to avoid.
• Test 3-year-olds on a series of stimulus-response compatibility tasks.
• Data inconsistent with there being modality-wide differences in automaticity.
• Data consistent with specific relation (word sound to gesture) reducing automaticity.
• Suggest complexity of words may slow development of automaticity.

Young children experience difficulty across a wide variety of situations that require them to suppress automatic responses. Verbal imitation, in contrast, is easy for children to suppress. This is all the more surprising because data from adult studies appear to be at odds with this observation. In two experiments, we investigated whether this surprising developmental finding with verbal imitation reflects a more general phenomenon—relating either to verbal responses or to auditory stimuli—or whether verbal imitation itself represents a unique case. In Experiment 1 (N = 24), it was found that verbal responses were not inherently easier for 3-year-olds to inhibit than manual responses. Experiment 2 (N = 24) showed that auditory stimuli did not evoke less automatic activation than visual stimuli. Taken together, these data suggest that verbal imitation is unique, or at least unusual, in being particularly easy for children to resist. It is suggested that the automaticity of verbal imitation may develop slowly and that the relation between word complexity and automaticity is likely to be a fruitful topic of further investigation.