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Abstract
We report an experimental study of imitation of two types of meaningful gestures: (a) social-communicative gestures, and (b) pantomimed actions with objects (including counterfunctional object use) by children and adolescents with autism. Controls were (a) children with nonautistic developmental delays, matched for chronological age and receptive language age, and (b) typically developing children matched for receptive language. Children in both comparison groups imitated actions more accurately than did children with autism, who nonetheless demonstrated understanding of the meaning of the gestures. However, the autistic group tended to have difficulty naming gestures and also was less able than controls to produce actions on verbal request. Children with lower levels of language ability, including those with autism, had difficulty imitating unconventional use of objects, instead using the object for their conventional functions. The discussion addresses the implications of these results and our own previous related findings for representational and executive accounts of praxic deficits in autistic spectrum disorders.
This research was conducted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Dalhousie University and was supported by a Medical Research Council of Canada studentship to IMS. The authors extend thanks to committee members Ray Klein, John Barresi, and John Fisk for their many valuable contributions, Bradley Frankland and Robert Rodger for statistical consultation, B. Doan for illustrations used in the gesture comprehension task, and Carol Thompson for data coding. A portion of this work was presented at a meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development in Minneapolis, MN in 2001.