Characteristics Of Motor Imitation In Autism

Imitation plays an important role in child development. It can help promote children’s social skill and other advanced abilities. Results of behavior observation and brain imaging research displayed a common conclusion that the lack of imitation is one of the main defects of the autistic children. Compared to normal children, autistic children showed significant obstacles in a series of motor imitation tasks. This study is based on theories of motor imitation in autism. The aim of this study is to examine the autistic children’s performance of motor imitation through quantitative research and provide suggestions and strategies for education and rehabilitation of autism. The whole research will be divided into three parts as the study of behavior characteristics, potential influence factors and correlation of motor imitation and language.There are three two factors mixed design experiments and one correlation research.Behavioral characteristics of motor imitation in autism:According to the motion type imitation ability can be divided into five parts:gross movements, meaningless gestures, meaningful gestures, the mouth action, control the action. Through the behavior observation experiment of motor imitation of t autism (experiment 1),we found that in five kinds of action tasks,Severe autistic children are lags behind the normal children and mild-to-moderate autistic children; Mild-to-moderate autistic children showed significant differences with the normal children in meaningful gestures imitation task.Potential influence factors of motor imitation in autism:This part of the study focus onthe internalization and intention understanding ability of autism and the imitation characteristics of autism under Sound or silent startup mode; Through two experiments (experiment 1,experiment 2),we found that Compared with normal children and mild-to-moderate autistic children, the ability of internalization and action intention understanding of severely autistic children is insufficient; Different startup mode of the imitation had a significant effect.Correlation of motor imitation and language in autism:We studied the correlation of the scores of all our subjects in five kinds of motor imitation tasks and in eight kinds of language tasks to analyze the correlation of motor imitation and language. We found that all children with autism showed different degree of correlation between most of the tasks of imitation and language. Correlation of motor imitation and language of normal children are only showed in the echolalia task. It suggests that ability of motor imitation is closely associated with language development, it may play a important role in language development.According to the experimental results above, this study proposed the targeted intervention training advice for autistic children’s abilities of imitation. Via ladder teaching and gradually stepped out assist we can improve autistic children’s imitation ability.