Imitation as a dyadic interchange pattern

Abstract.— Imitation was considered one pattern of interactional behavior adopted by children. Forty-eight firstgrade children were paired with experimenters, who first gave instructions for imitation, attention, or for joint or isolate play and later behaved identically toward all the children. Children who received instructions either to copy or to simply pay attention watched and then copied the adults. The other children played with the adults, or played alone and ignored the adults, as expected. Later in a standard phase, children continued to attend and copy if they had initially received explicit instructions to copy, but not if they had gotten instructions only for attention. Children given comparison instructions shifted on some measures, but followed many initial patterns. The implications for interactional patterning in imitation and other recurrent situations were discussed.