The Relationship between narrative abilities and multimodal imitation abilities in preschool children

Abstract

Previous studies have shown that gestures precede and predict children's milestones in vocabulary, sentence structure, and narratives. Yet little is known about whether multimodal imitation abilities (understood as the ability to jointly imitate gestures, prosody, and lexical content) and narratives are correlated in typically developing preschool children. To examine the potential correlations between narratives and imitation (multimodal imitation and object-based imitation), 31 typically developing 3- to 4-year-old children performed a narrative task, a multimodal imitation task and an object-based imitation task. The correlations obtained revealed that (a) narratives correlate with multimodal imitation (as well as gestural, prosodic and lexical imitation separately); and (b) object-based imitation does not correlate with either multimodal imitation or with narratives. These results show that multimodal abilities (specifically, gesture and prosodic abilities) form a tightly linked communication system that is strongly related to language, and highlight the potential importance of multimodal imitation trainings in language development.