Lelonkiewicz Jarosław R, Pickering Martin J, Branigan Holly P
Cognitive Neuroscience Area, Scuola Internazionale Superiore di Studi Avanzati, via Bonomea 265, Trieste 34136, Italy.
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh, EH8 9JZ, UK.
R Soc Open Sci. 2021 Nov 24;8(11):211107. doi: 10.1098/rsos.211107. eCollection 2021 Nov.
According to an influential hypothesis, people imitate motor movements to foster social interactions. Could imitation of language serve a similar function? We investigated this question in two pre-registered experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to alternate naming pictures and matching pictures to a name provided by a partner. Crucially, and unknown to participants, the partner was in fact a computer program which in one group produced the same names as previously used by the participant, and in the other group consistently produced different names. We found no difference in how the two groups evaluated the partner or the interaction and no difference in their willingness to cooperate with the partner. In Experiment 2, we made the task more similar to natural interactions by adding a stage in which a participant and the partner introduced themselves to each other and included a measure of the participant's autistic traits. Once again, we found no effects of being imitated. We discuss how these null results may inform imitation research.
根据一个有影响力的假说，人们模仿动作是为了促进社交互动。那么，对语言的模仿是否也能起到类似的作用呢？我们在两项预先注册的实验中对这个问题进行了研究。在实验1中，参与者被要求交替命名图片，并将图片与伙伴提供的名称进行匹配。关键的是，参与者并不知道，伙伴实际上是一个计算机程序，在一组中，该程序给出的名称与参与者之前使用的相同，而在另一组中，程序给出的名称始终不同。我们发现，两组参与者对伙伴或互动的评价没有差异，他们与伙伴合作的意愿也没有差异。在实验2中，我们增加了一个参与者和伙伴互相介绍的阶段，使任务更类似于自然互动，并纳入了对参与者自闭症特征的测量。结果再次表明，被模仿并没有产生影响。我们讨论了这些零结果如何为模仿研究提供参考。
