title: Vocal overimitation in preschool-age children.
abstract: Overimitation--copying incorrect, idiosyncratic, or causally irrelevant actions--has been linked to our species' long history with artifacts whose functions are often opaque. It is an open question, however, whether children overimitate outside the artifact domain. We explored this question by presenting preschool-age children (3- to 5-year-olds, N=120) with an elicited imitation task that included high- and low-frequency disyllabic nouns (e.g., 'pizza) and nonwords (e.g., 'chizza), all of which had a stressed first syllable. However, during testing, half of the stimuli were incorrectly pronounced by stressing the second syllable (e.g., pi'zza). More than half of the children copied the model's incorrect pronunciation of high-frequency familiar words, consistent with overimitation. This pattern of response persisted even after children had themselves correctly named the familiar words prior to the start of testing, confirming that children purposefully altered the pronunciation of known words to match the incorrect pronunciations used by a model. These results demonstrate that overimitation is not restricted to the artifact domain and might extend to many different tasks and domains.
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing Science, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA; Department of Anthropology, Center for the Advanced Study of Hominid Paleobiology, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA; GW Institute for Neuroscience, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA; GW Mind-Brain Institute, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA. Electronic address: subiaul@gwu.edu.
authors.forename: Francys
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Subiaul
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing Science, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA.
authors.forename: Katherine
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Winters
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing Science, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA.
authors.forename: Kathryn
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Krumpak
authors.affiliation: Department of Speech and Hearing Science, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA; GW Mind-Brain Institute, The George Washington University, Washington, DC 20052, USA. Electronic address: core@gwu.edu.
authors.forename: Cynthia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Core
mesh_terms: D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003071:Cognition; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007100:Imitative Behavior; D007804:Language Development; D007858:Learning; D008297:Male; D000067570:Social Learning; D013637:Tape Recording
keywords: Cognitive development; Ghost control; Imitation; Language development; Overimitation; Social learning; Speech; Vocal learning