The Characteristics Of 3 To 5-year-olds' Imitation By Imitating The Goal/Objected-directed Task

Imitation can not only help children learning all kinds of knowledge and skills,but also can effectively promoting children's mastery of traditional culture and customs. Factors that influense children's imitation and children's imitation characteristics in a specific situation have been the key points in this field.Western scholars have gotten a variety of interesting conclusions that based on the Western culture by using kinds of experimental paradigms. but few experiments have been done in China. So what are the rules and characteristics of the Eastern children's imitation,whether the conclusions that get based on the Western culture still suit those in the Eastern culture....all of these need us to explore urgently.What's more,the controversial view that socilal comunication has infulence on children's imitation also needs to get a wider and deeper exploration.The goal-directed task was carried out to explore the goal, age and socilal comunication factors' infulence to 3 to 5-year-old children's imitation ability. The results indicated that there were marginally significant differences between different ages. The children in Eastern culture behaved differently from those in the Western culture when comunicatingt with experimenter normally. The social comunication also had significant influence on children's imitation in the goal-directed task.The study finally got 3 conclusions: Goal situation's influences on children's imitaton are different when tested in different cultures. If the children comunicating with experimenter normally such as having eye contact, saying hello and so on,children in the Eastern culture will imitate the adults' whole actions no matter there is a goal or not. This is a challenge to the famous “Imitation Hierarchy'' theory which said that children will imitate the behavior goal for the first, only when the goal being inexsistence, they will start to imitate the behavior actions; Children's imitation fidelity is increasing with the age. 4 and 5-year-old children's imitaion fidelity of demonstrated behavior is much higher than 3-year-old children's, there are not significant differences between the 4 and 5-year-old children's action and goal imitations;Social comunication can increase children's imitation fidelity. If there issocial comunication between the experimenter and the participants, they will imitate the demonstrated behavior actions, no matter the behavior goal exsisting or not.