Cognitive development of imitation of intransitive gestures: an analysis of hand and finger errors

ABSTRACT

The dual-route model proposes that imitation of meaningful gestures relies on a lexical route whereas imitation of meaningless gestures relies on a sub-lexical route. The aim of the present study was to investigate the development of imitation of intransitive meaningful and meaningless gestures in children from 6 to 9 years old by exploring hand and finger errors. Despite lower performance, children showed similar patterns than adults with better imitation of meaningful compared to meaningless gestures. Concerning body part errors, children made more errors than adults. Moreover, children produced more hand errors than adults for meaningful gestures whereas they were no difference for meaningless gestures. These results suggest that the two routes are present but are still maturing. Moreover, several specific and non-specific factors may have impacted imitation skills. Further studies are needed to disentangle the role of these factors in imitation of intransitive gestures during development from childhood to adulthood.

KEYWORDS:

• Imitation
• intransitive gestures
• lexical route
• sub-lexical route
• development

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available in OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/osf.io/7brks/.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The sub-lexical route can support both MF and ML gestures, only when they are presented in the same block of stimuli (Tessari et al., 2006; Tessari & Rumiati, 2004).

2 We choose to calculate an estimation of the sample size based on the results existing in children’s studies instead of adults’ studies, because the difference between imitation of ML and MF gestures in adults is important and may lead to a reduced sample of participants. For instance, based on the data reported by Carmo and Rumiati (2009), the estimated sample size is n = 3 adults with a power of 95% at an alpha of 0.05.

3 One needs to be cautious when interpreting brain-behavior relations in children from data obtained in brain-damaged adults’ patients. It is likely that imitation of hand and finger postures is relying upon multiple processes widely distributed in the brain (Caspers et al., 2010; Lesourd, Osiurak, et al., 2018) that could be engaged differentially according to the level of development. Moreover, the cognitive system in children does not present the same properties as adults (i.e., Modularity; for a discussion see Karmiloff-smith et al., 2003).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by grants from Conseil Regional de Bourgogne Franche-Comté (“REPRESACT” Project, AAP Amorçage 2021) and Université Franche-Comté (AAP Chrysalide 2020-2021).