The effect of context on imitation skills in children with autism

Children with autism exhibit deficits in imitation skills. Previous authors have suggested that they may have particular difficulty imitating in natural social interactions, but properly controlled experiments investigating this possibility have not been conducted. To investigate this possibility, children with autism and typically developing children were compared on a series of imitation tasks presented either in a structured-elicited or naturalistic-spontaneous condition. Modeled actions were counterbalanced across conditions. Results suggest children with autism imitated less than typically developing children overall; however, this difference was mainly evident when the imitation task was presented in a spontaneous context. In addition, they exhibited less coordinated joint attention during imitation than the typically developing children. These findings support the hypothesis that children with autism are particularly impaired in their ability to imitate spontaneously.