Nonverbal imitation skills in children with specific language delay.
Toddlers with language delay show specific deficits in pretend and body-movement imitation that aren’t explained by motor skills—check imitation during assessment.
01Research in Context
What this study did
McDuffie et al. (2013) watched toddlers with specific language delay copy two kinds of moves.
One task was simple body motions, like clapping. The other was pretend play, like feeding a doll.
They compared the kids to same-age peers who talked on track.
What they found
The language-delay group could move just fine, but they copied fewer pretend actions.
They also missed more body-movement steps than the typical talkers.
The gap points to a social-thinking issue, not weak muscles.
How this fits with other research
Treffert (2014) pooled dozens of autism studies and found the same pattern: big imitation gaps that vanish when you only score the end result. Andrea’s toddlers fit right in, showing the problem starts even before an autism label.
McAuliffe et al. (2020) saw autistic school-age kids learn gestures slower across many trials. Andrea’s single-trial snapshot shows the seed of that slower curve in younger, non-autistic children.
Bryłka et al. (2024) found kids with language disorder only forget pictures that have names. Together the studies hint that any task you can “say in your head” trips these kids up, whether it’s memory or imitation.
Why it matters
If a toddler’s words are behind, check how well they copy silly pretend play, not just fine-motor taps. Weak pretend imitation can flag social-cognition delays early. Add brief imitation probes to your language assessment kit. When you see gaps, target pretend schemes in therapy and give extra visual cues instead of more verbal prompts.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Add a two-minute pretend-imitation probe to your intake protocol and note which steps the child omits.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Research in children with language problems has focussed on verbal deficits, and we have less understanding of children's deficits with nonverbal sociocognitive skills which have been proposed to be important for language acquisition. This study was designed to investigate elicited nonverbal imitation in children with specific language delay (SLD). It is argued that difficulties in nonverbal imitation, which do not involve the processing of structural aspects of language, may be indicative of sociocognitive deficits. Participants were German-speaking typically developing children (n=60) and children with SLD (n=45) aged 2-3 ½ years. A novel battery of tasks measured their ability to imitate a range of nonverbal target acts that to a greater or lesser extent involve sociocognitive skills (body movements, instrumental acts on objects, pretend acts). Significant group differences were found for all body movement and pretend act tasks, but not for the instrumental act tasks. The poorer imitative performance of the SLD sample was not explained by motor or nonverbal cognitive skills. Thus, it appeared that the nature of the task affected children's imitation performance. It is argued that the ability to establish a sense of connectedness with the demonstrator was at the core of children's imitation difficulty in the SLD sample.
Research in developmental disabilities, 2013 · doi:10.1016/j.ridd.2013.06.004