Meltzoff A N
Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Seattle 98195.
Child Dev. 1988 Feb;59(1):217-25. doi: 10.1111/j.1467-8624.1988.tb03210.x.
The ability of 9-month-old infants to imitate simple actions with novel objects was investigated. Both immediate and deferred imitation were tested, the latter by interposing a 24-hour delay between the stimulus-presentation and response periods. The results provide evidence for both immediate and deferred imitation; moreover, imitative responding was not significantly dampened by the 24-hour delay. The findings demonstrate that there exists some underlying capacity for deferring imitation of certain acts well under 1 year of age, and thus that this ability does not develop in a stagelike step function at about 18-24 months as commonly predicted. These findings also show that imitation in early infancy can span wide enough delays to be of potential service in social development; actions on novel objects that are observed one day can be stored by the child and repeated the next day. The study of deferred imitation provides a largely untapped method for investigating the nature and development of recall memory in the preverbal child.
对9个月大婴儿使用新物体模仿简单动作的能力进行了研究。对即时模仿和延迟模仿都进行了测试，后者是通过在刺激呈现期和反应期之间插入24小时的延迟来进行的。结果为即时模仿和延迟模仿都提供了证据；此外，模仿反应并未因24小时的延迟而显著减弱。这些发现表明，在1岁以下的儿童中存在某种潜在的延迟模仿特定行为的能力，因此这种能力并非如通常预测的那样在18 - 24个月左右以阶段性的阶梯函数形式发展。这些发现还表明，婴儿早期的模仿可以跨越足够长的延迟时间，从而在社交发展中发挥潜在作用；孩子可以将前一天观察到的对新物体的动作储存起来，并在第二天重复。延迟模仿的研究为调查前语言儿童回忆记忆的本质和发展提供了一种很大程度上未被利用的方法。
