imitation of pretend play acts by children with autism and down syndrome

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Vol. 27, No. 4, 1997

Imitation of Pretend Play Acts by Childrenwith Autism and Down Syndrome1

Sarah Libby2

University of Kent at Canterbury

Stuart Powell and David MesserUniversity of Hertfordshire

Rita JordanUniversity of Birmingham

Although there has recently been considerable research interest in thedifficulties that children with autism have engaging in pretend play, littleattention has been paid to the ability of these children to imitate pretend playacts. Furthermore, suggestions that children with Down syndrome haverelatively advanced abilities in pretend play have not been accompanied by anexamination of their capacity to imitate pretend play. Three groups of children:autistic, Down syndrome, and normally developing were studied for theircapacity to imitate single pretend acts and a series of pretend acts that formedscripts. While the children with autism were surprisingly better than the othertwo groups on the single-scheme task, they demonstrated specific difficultieson the multischeme task. Results are discussed in relation to current theoriesof autism and the notion of imitation.

INTRODUCTION

The Relationship Between Imitation and Pretend Play

In normally developing infants functional and symbolic play emergein the first 2 years of life. Functional play initially appears in the child's

1We thank the children, parents, and teachers who made this study possible. We also expressour gratitude to Natasha Mott for her help in the data collection and analysis.

2Address all correspondence to Sarah Libby, Department of Psychology, University of Kentat Canterbury, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NP, United Kingdom.

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0162-3257/97/0800-0365$12.50/0 © 1997 Plenum Publishing Corporation

behavioral repertoire at approximately 14 months (Bretherton, 1984) andinvolves a capacity to act on objects as their function denotes even if theyare miniaturized versions of everyday objects (e.g., pushing a toy car, drink-ing from a miniaturized cup). Symbolic play emerges later at approximately20 months and is often considered demonstrative of a child's ability to treatan object or situation as if it is something else (e.g., Leslie, 1987). Brether-ton (1984) has described a developmental sequence in the emergence ofdifferent types of symbolic play. For example, children are first able to usean object as something else when it does not possess a clear function (e.g.,using a wooden block as a car). Later objects that have clear functions canbe used to represent something that has a counterfunction (e.g., a bananaas a telephone). At a more advanced developmental stage an object maybe referred to as if it is there, although it is not (e.g., eating invisible food).

The role of imitation in the emergence of these skills remains conten-tious. Meltzoff and Moore (1977, 1983, 1989) have demonstrated that neo-nates can model actions performed by others (e.g., tongue protrusion).Furthermore, these studies have shown that by 9 months deferred imitationcan be demonstrated after a 24 hour delay. At 14 months children canrespond to another mirroring their action. This research suggests that com-plex forms of imitation should be available to normally developing infantsprior to the development of pretend play and therefore may have a rolein its emergence. For example, imitation may act as a catalyst in the de-velopment of skills during infancy and help children bridge the zone ofproximal development (Vygotsky, 1964). Through the reproduction of actstogether with the internalization and generalization of this experience in-fants could acquire specific abilities, such as pretend play.

Imitation in Children with Autism

A number of studies (e.g., Abrahamsen & Mitchell 1990; Curcio, 1978;Sigman & Ungerer, 1984) have suggested that children with autism havedifficulties imitating simple body actions. Such observations have led to theargument that imitation is one of the rudimentary deficits present in theautistic syndrome (Rogers & Pennington, 1993; Smith & Bryson, 1994).

It is hard to marry this proposition with some findings regarding theautistic condition. Foremost, a characteristic manifest in some autistic in-dividual's speech in echolalia (i.e., the parroting or imitating of speech ut-tered by others; McEvoy, Loveland, & Landry, 1988). Rogers andPennington (1991) explained this contradiction with the suggestion that dif-ferent modalities have separate neurological circuitry, therefore parallelperformances across modalities would not be expected. However, neuronalcircuitry relating to imitative abilities and their relative dysfunction in

Libby, Powell, Messer, and Jordan366

autism have not been isolated; so, this claim remains speculative. Second,Dawson and Adams (1984) have demonstrated that individuals with autismare capable of responding to someone who mirrors them. This preservedability is difficult to comprehend when more basic imitative skills are re-ported to be absent. In addition, a number of studies have found basicimitation skills present in their samples of children with autism (Charman& Baron-Cohen, 1994; Morgan, Cutrer, Coplin, & Rodrigue, 1989). There-fore, despite imitation being proposed as a central deficit in the autisticcondition some empirical findings induce ambivalence about this claim.

Pretend Play in Children with Autism

There is continuing debate on the specific nature and the causal un-derpinnings of the difficulties in pretend play experienced by children withautism (see Jarrold, Boucher, & Smith, 1993, for a review). Despite a con-sensus that individuals with autism have specific problems in the realm ofimaginative behavior there is disagreement over the extent of this difficulty.Most theorists agree that this group experiences difficulties in the sponta-neous production of symbolic play (e.g., Ungerer & Sigman, 1981), al-though some such play has been observed in this population (Atlas, 1990;Wing, Gould, Yeates, & Brierley, 1977). A further issue is that any symbolicplay demonstrated is described as repetitive and stereotyped and lackingin creativity when compared to other children (Wulff, 1985). It has alsobeen suggested that there are deficits in the use of functional play (Lewis& Boucher, 1988; Stone, Lemanek, Fischel, Fernandez, & Altemeier, 1990),although this issue remains contentious.

Children with autism are not devoid of all skills relating to pretense al-though there is clearly a problem in spontaneous production. For example,Lewis and Boucher (1988) have reported that under elicited or instructed con-ditions children with autism can demonstrate pretend play. More recently anumber of studies have shown that children with autism are capable of com-prehending play acts and predicting the outcomes of pretend transformations(Jarrold, Smith, Boucher, & Harris, 1994; Kavanaugh & Harris, 1994).

Few studies have explored the ability of children with autism to imi-tate pretend play. Those that have report specific problems with the imi-tation of symbolic play acts (Hammes & Langdell, 1981; Heimann,Ullstadius, Dahlgren, & Gillberg, 1992; Riguet, Taylor, Benaroya, & Klein,1981). Furthermore, the DSM-IV (American Psychiatric Association,1994) uses a lack of social imitative play in children with autism as a di-agnostic criterion.

Imitation of Pretend Play Acts 367

Imitation and Pretend Play in Children with Down Syndrome

Compared with the abundance of research that has been carried outinto pretend play and imitation in the autistic population, relatively littlework in this field has been conducted with children with Down syndrome.Analyses of the pretend play of this group suggests that they proceedthrough the same developmental sequence observed in the normally devel-oping population (Hill & McCune-Nicholich, 1981; Motti, Cicchetti, &Sroufe, 1983). Moreover, a few studies have indicated that children withDown syndrome have advanced skills in the realm of pretend play in re-lation to their language abilities (Shimada, 1990; Wing et al., 1977).

Imitation has been observed to be in advance of object permanencein children with Down syndrome, as it is in normally developing infants(e.g., Rast & Meltzoff, 1993, cited in Meltzoff & Gopnik, 1994). However,imitation of pretend play does not appear to have been specifically exploredin this group. One might predict that children with Down syndrome wouldnot have any particular difficulties with these type of tasks considering ourcurrent knowledge of their capacity to demonstrate the normal emergenceof both pretend play and imitation. They act as a befitting control groupfor children with autism as although they experience learning difficulties,they do not have the specific difficulties in communication, socialization,and imagination associated with autism.

RATIONALE FOR THE STUDY

This study was concerned with the ability of children with autism andDown syndrome to imitate a series of pretend play acts. An adaptation of amethodology devised by Thal and Bates (1988) to look at the relationshipbetween language and gestural development in late talkers was employed todevelop single- and multischeme tasks. The tasks used are described below.

Single-Scheme Task

This included a series of pretend acts using objects graded in accord-ance with the developmental sequence of pretend play observed in normaldevelopment (Bretherton, 1984):

Placeholders, a series of wooden blocks of a similar shape and size tothe object symbolized (e.g., using a wooden cube as a cup).

Counterfunctional objects, objects that have a clear function that devi-ates from the function of the object symbolized (e.g., using a ball as a cup).


Empty-handed gestures, pretend play actions performed without objectsas a prop (e.g., move hand up to mouth as if drinking).All the actions used in this task are symbolic play acts using Leslie's (1987)criteria.

The following hypothesis was made: (a) The children with autism will per-form less well at imitating single symbolic play acts than the other two groups.

Multischeme Task

Three multischeme acts were presented, these depicted scripts that werelikely to be familiar to the children: feeding, bathing, and going to bed. Afunctional play script (i.e., with the appropriate miniaturized objects), a scriptusing placeholders, and a script using counterfunctional objects were enacted.These were presented in the correct order, where the script made sense as anarrative, and a scrambled order, where the order of presentation made thescript meaningless (e.g., the girl was put in the bath with her dress on). Thescrambled order was performed to explore the importance of a meaningfulcontext on the capacity to imitate the scripts. Previous research has indicatedthat individuals with autism rely less on such cues when performing tasks.For example, Frith and Snowling (1983) found that children with autism werelikely to give the more frequent pronunciation of homographs despite thesentential context. Normally developing children and those with dyslexia usedthe context of the words to aid pronunciation.

The following hypotheses were made: (a) The children with autism willperform less well than the other two groups of children when the schemesare presented in the correct order, and (b) The children with autism willperform similarly on the correct order and scrambled tasks, whereas theother two groups of children will be worse at the scrambled task.

METHOD

Subjects

Thirty children participated in this study, 10 each with autism, Downsyndrome, and normal development. The characteristics of these childrenare displayed in Table I. It should be noted that the groups of childrenwere matched on verbal mental age but not sex or chronological age.

The children with autism displayed the triad of impairments (Wing &Gould, 1979) that are a prerequisite for a diagnosis of autism and attendedschools for children with autism. One of the children with Down syndromeattended a school for children with moderate learning difficulties (MLD);the others were preschool but had access to some nursery provision. Seven

369Imitation of Pretend Play Acts

Libby, Powell, Messer, and Jordan

of the normally developing children attended private day nurseries, the re-mainder were cared for at home by a parent.

The children were matched for their verbal mental age on the ReynellDevelopmental Language Scale (Reynell & Huntley, 1987). Table I showsthat there is no significant difference between the groups on language com-prehension or expression.

The objects used to perform the single-scheme task are described inAppendix A and those used in the multischeme task in Appendix B. Theyconstitute a variety of different shaped blocks and objects.

Design and Procedure

The children were tested in a quiet room either at school, at nursery,or in the home depending on what was most convenient or appropriate.The children became familiar with the experimenter through a warm-upsession which involved playing with a group of toys that were not used inthe experimental study. The sessions were video-recorded for later analyses.

The adult modeled each of the actions or scripts before handing theobject to the child saying "You do it." The procedure for the single-schemetask is detailed in Appendix A and that for the multischeme task in AppendixB. If the child did not imitate the action or acted on the objects inappropri-ately the demonstration was repeated or verbal prompts given (e.g., "can youmake this into a cup?"). The order in which these acts were presented was

370

Table I. Chronological Age, Gender, and Language Abilities of the Children

Group (No. of girls and boys)

Autistic (1 girl, 9 boys)MSDRangen

Down syndrome (6 girls, 4 boys)MSDRangen

Normally developing (3 girls, 7 boys)MSDRangen

Kruskal-Wallis statisticsHdf

Chronologicalage (months)

12644.0364-200

5513.5939-80

282.08

26-31

Reynellcomprehension

(months)

323.12

25-358

303.77

25-359

324.00

28-4110

Reynellexpression(months)

303.42

25-348

322.91

29-377

323.33

27-3610

1.07, ns 0.38, ns2 2

randomized so effects due to order were eliminated. The multischeme actswere presented after the single-scheme task was completed.

Scoring

Single-Scheme Task. Each child was scored as giving a correct responseif the target action was copied. If the child had not responded after threeprompts any correct response given later was not scored.

Multischeme Acts. The following method was used to score the child'sperformance on the multischeme task. If the child performed two correct actsin succession, 3 points were scored for that pair of actions. If the child didthe first act at the beginning but did not follow it with the next appropriateaction, or the last act at the end of the scheme, 2 points were given. If thechild performed an act but did not put it in the order presented, 1 point wasscored. So, there was a potential score of 12 for the bedtime and the bathingschemes and 9 for the feeding scheme. If the child failed to respond afterthree prompts any response given after this time was scored as failure torespond. When the scheme was presented in a scrambled order the responseswere scored in two ways, as the scheme given above and as if the task hadbeen presented in the correct order. In the former case a high sore wouldindicate that the child had followed the demonstration. In the latter case ahigh score would suggest that the child had followed the normal script formatfor these actions rather than reproduce the order of the acts in the demon-stration. This scoring procedure explored whether or not the children showedany tendency towards correcting the order of the scrambled presentation asthis may be indicative of a tendency to make the script coherent; a behaviorthat would not be expected from the children with autism.

Attitudes. Attitudes towards taking part in the task were recorded. Asonly one of these attitudes is discussed in this article this alone is definedhere. It was noted whether any of the children had difficulties acceptingthe objects or actions used in any of the pretended acts. For example, thechildren may make a verbal rejection, "no it's a ball" or "it's a brick really"and refuse to perform the act. This is referred to as attitude A.

Interrater Reliability. Two experimenters coded six of the children's per-formance on the tasks independently and a Cohen's Kappa of .84 wasachieved for task performance and .90 for judging attitude A (Cohen, 1960).

RESULTS

Single-Scheme Task

The results for the single-scheme task are displayed in Table II. Therewas a main effect of group found using ANOVA, F(2, 217) = 525, p <


Table II. Percentage of Correct Responses for the Single-Scheme Task

Type of single-scheme act

Group Placeholders Counterfunct. Empty handed All

AutisticM 86.00 90.00 88.70 87.92SD 18.97 14.14 19.32 15.01

Down syndromeM 90.00 68.00 68.75 75.68SD 14.14 25.30 40.16 21.04

Normally developingM 64.58 60.42 59.57 61.54SD 47.44 49.42 47.59 47.07

.01. A Tukey posttest showed that the children with autism were signifi-cantly more likely to give the correct response than the normally developingchildren (p = .05).


Multischeme Task

Multischeme Task Presented in the Correct Order. Table III shows thepattern of results for the tasks presented in the correct order. There wasno significant difference in performance across the three groups, F(2, 27)= 1.73, p = .18, although the children with autism tended to perform lesswell than the other two groups of children on this task.

Multischeme Task Presented in a Scrambled Order. The percentage ofcorrect responses obtained by the different groups of children on this taskare displayed in Table IV. There is no significant difference in the threegroups ability to perform this task, F(2, 27) = 1.10, p = .34. When thescrambled multischeme tasks were scored as if the task had been presentedin the appropriate order, a measure of whether the children were correctingthe order was obtained. The resulting scores are also shown in Table IV

Table HI. Percentage of Correct Scores Obtained on the Multischeme Task Pre-sented in the Correct Order

Group

AutisticMSD

Downs syndromeMSD

Normally developingMSD

Bathing/Feeding/real placeholders

52.22 38.3332.91 36.98

67.78 49.1724.38 26.48

71.11 50.8325.77 28.45

Putting to bed/counterfunct.

27.7832.54

19.1729.50

40.0028.57

All

33.3632.39

43.3321.86

52.4212.30


Table IV. Percentage of Correct Scores Obtained on the Multischeme Task Presented inthe Scrambled Order

Group

Autistc

Down syndrome

Normally developing

Method ofscoring

ScrambledMSD

CorrectedMSD

ScrambledMSD

CorrectedMSD

ScrambledMSD

CorrectedMSD

Feeding/real

43.3332.48

30.0024.12

23.4622.53

53.3347.79

41.1111.77

50.8321.88

Bathing/placeholders

27.5031.39

37.7830.98

38.3913.83

50.0027.27

34.179.98

54.4422.03

Putting tobed/counter-

funct.

24.1729.78

17.5014.40

24.1723.72

24.1723.71

29.1715.34

35.8322.24

All

30.6128.62

27.5823.46

29.1315.10

41.8226.02

34.247.15

46.3613.48

A main effect of group was found, F(2, 27) = 3.72, p = .03, and a Tukeyposttest on these data showed that the autistic children were significantlyless likely to obtain high correction scores than the children with normaldevelopment (p = .05). There was a significant difference in performancebetween the correct and scrambled tasks, F(1, 27) = 5.56, p = .01, withthe children tending to produce poorer results on the scrambled task. Therewas no significant effect of Group, F(l, 27) = 0.52, p = .1, but a patternin these results was apparent. The children with Down syndrome and nor-mal development clearly performed worse when the scheme was scrambled;whereas the children with autism performed similarly to when the schemeswere presented in the correct order. This pattern is better illustrated inFigure 1.

Attitudes

The children with autism were significantly less likely to produce theattitude A, that is refusals to imitate the task presented, than the othertwo groups of children during the single scheme task. A main effect ofGroup was found F(2, 27) = 3.97, p = .03. A Tukey posttest showed thatthe children with autism differed significantly from both the children withnormal development (p = .05) and Down syndrome (p = .05). This isshown more clearly in Figure 2.

374 Libby, Powell, Messer, and Jordan

Fig. 1. A comparison of scores obtained on the multischeme task presented in the correctand scrambled orders.

Attitude A was rare during the multischeme task, produced only onceby the children with Down syndrome, twice by the children with normal de-velopment, and never by the children with autism. No statistical test was ap-plied to these data but there seems to be little variation across the three

Fig. 2. Number of times attitude A was displayed by the children during the single-schemetask.

groups of children. The same group of children were visited 3 months afterthese data were collected, and this experiment repeated. The authors notethat the findings obtained at this follow-up visit support the pattern of resultsreported here. Details of these findings can be obtained from the authors.

DISCUSSION

Single-Scheme Task

Children With Autism

This study found that children with autism could imitate symbolic playacts. Furthermore, they performed better than children with Down syn-drome and normal development who had comparable verbal mental ages.This is contrary to much previous research suggesting that children withautism have particular difficulties reproducing acts that are of a symbolicnature (Heimann et al. 1992; Hammes & Langdell, 1981; Ungerer & Sig-man, 1981; Riguet et al. 1981).

What could explain the conflicting nature of these findings? Perhapsthe responses we observed are indicative of a form of echopraxia, the exactreplication of actions. Echopraxia has been observed in the autistic popu-lation by a number of authors, especially with regard to signing (Jordan,1993; Koegel, Rincover, & Egel, 1982). Such echopraxia may be analogouswith the echolalia demonstrated in this population. Therefore, imitationproduced by autistic children could be qualitatively different to that pro-duced by other individuals. Their responses may be automatic and per-formed without interpretation of all aspects of the incoming data. Thissuggestion is born out by the finding that the children with autism rarelyproduced a verbal objection to the action or object being used (e.g., "No,it's a ball"), unlike the other two groups.

The phenomenon of partial imitation in the autistic population re-ported by Ohta (1987) may provide further evidence of this echopraxic phe-nomenon. Partial imitations are responses that fail to take account of thewhole context. For example, if an experimenter holds his/her palms up tohis/her face children with autism may respond by showing the adult theirown palms. This difficulty displayed by some individuals with autism intranslating an imitative act from others viewpoint to their own may reflectboth a tendency to produce echopraxic responses and problems in under-standing the different perspectives of a situation.

Thus, although children with autism seem to be capable of imitatingpretend play acts they may remain at a level of copying the behavior rather


than imitating with a complete understanding of the actions they are pro-ducing. At present the processing components required in imitation arenot clear but could include a capacity to remember, generalize, and repro-duce the act. Thus, imitation may have a role in the development of pre-tend play through bridging the zone of proximal development and allowingthe child to internalize and generalize skills. This may not occur if the childis simply copying the actions of another.

One possible means of exploring these processing levels further isthrough examining the capacity of these children to demonstrate deferredimitation of symbolic acts. If children with autism are capable of reproduc-ing acts some time after they were presented it would demonstrate thatthey have stored the memory of the action over time. However, it may notexclude the possibility that the imitative abilities of the children aregrounded in a form of echopraxia. Just as this group of individuals maydemonstrate delayed echolalia (McEvoy et al., 1988), delayed echopraxiamay be a feature of this group. It is clear that more precise definitions ofthe processing levels involved in imitation are required if we are to under-stand the status of imitation in the autistic population.

Children with Down Syndrome

The children with Down syndrome showed a performance level inter-mediate between that demonstrated by the children with autism and thosewith normal development. Furthermore, they did not differ significantlyfrom either of these groups. However, an indication that they are behavingmore like the children with normal development is that they produced sig-nificantly more examples of attitude A than the children with autism. Theserejections could suggest that they are processing all aspects of the incomingdata and are not demonstrating echopraxic responses.

Methodological Issues

It is important to bear in mind that unlike many previous studies ofimitation (e.g., Abrahamsen & Mitchell, 1990; Curcio, 1978; Sigman &Ungerer, 1984) the action was accompanied by a verbal instruction. A rep-lication of this study without these instructions may be required to ensurethat they have not influenced the results. However, if the actions were per-formed without the accompanying verbal instruction, the action in manycases ceases to be symbolic. For example, simply moving a book throughthe air does not denote the representation of an aeroplane. Maybe pre-senting the child with a picture of the target object (e.g., an aeroplane)


and then performing the action would circumvent some of these difficulties.However, the child is still having access to clues as to what to do beyondthe act presented by the experimenter.

An alternative explanation of these results relates to the children withautism being older than the other children. This may have affected theircapacity to imitate others due to greater experience or educational influ-ences. As much of the pedagogy of individuals with autism is based onencouraging the copying of skills this may have biased the findings. Thisexplanation cannot be ruled out and ideally the study needs to be replicatedon a group of preschool children with autism so pedagogical and patho-logical influences can be separated out.

Multischeme Task

Children with Autism

The lack of significant differences in many of the results obtained onthe multischeme tasks makes any conclusions speculative. However, therewas a tendency for the children with autism to perform less well than theother two groups on the multischeme task when it was presented in thecorrect order, but to do as well as the other children when the same taskwas presented in a scrambled order.

These results may be explained with recourse to the recent sugges-tions that children with autism have difficulties developing central coher-ence (Happe, 1994). Frith (1989) described central coherence as "thenormal tendency to draw together diverse information to construct higherlevel meaning in context." This hypothesis supports the suggestion thatindividuals with autism have an "inability or unwillingness to representthe canonical cultural forms of human action and interaction by the ve-hicle of narrative encoding" (Bruner & Feldman, 1993). This propositionwas generated from observations that the type of narratives that able in-dividuals with autism produce are deficient (Loveland & Tunali, 1993).Both these approaches stress that individuals with autism have difficultyextracting the meaning and sense of experiences. Such a deficit wouldpredict poorer performance on the multischeme task presented in thecorrect order as they would have a tendency to remember the acts asdiscrete parts and not be driven to process the incoming data as a co-herent script. The other two groups of children would be able to usetheir propensity towards making incoming stimuli coherent and their gen-eral sense of narrative to aid in the remembering of the correct orderedtasks.


Tasks presented in a scrambled order have their central coherence andnarrative structure removed; such presentations could handicap the chil-dren with Down syndrome and the normally developing children as theycannot use coherence as a structure for memorizing. Consequently, it isnot surprising that the children with autism perform at a similar level onboth the correct and scrambled order of presentation if they do not haveaccess to this strategy. The potential absence of a capacity to generate co-herence is further demonstrated by the children with autism tending notto correct the order in which the scrambled data were presented. The chil-dren with Down syndrome and normal development did this to a signifi-cantly greater extent than the children with autism.

It is also noted that all three groups of children rarely producedattitude A during the multischeme task. The discrepancy in the produc-tion of attitude A by the children with normal development and Downsyndrome on the single and multischeme tasks may also have some bear-ing on the role of coherence. It may be the case that when nonautisticchildren encounter symbolic play acts that are presented in a coherentnarrative they are less likely to question the objects or actions used. Thissupports the suggestion that the propensity to make sense out of inputis important in the way nonautistic infants extract knowledge and learnthrough imitation. This set of findings offers some verification for ouroriginal hypothesis that individuals with autism do not have access to suchstrategies.

Children with Down Syndrome

Like the normally developing children, the children with Down syn-drome performed relatively well on the multischeme task when it waspresented in the correct order, but poorer on the multischeme task whenit was scrambled. Furthermore, children with Down syndrome had a ten-dency to correct the order of the acts that were presented in the scram-bled order. If our above hypothesis is correct, children with Downsyndrome like normally developing infants, have access to strategies thatinvolve central coherence which may aid their capacity to imitate anddevelop pretend play.

Methodological Issues

The multischeme task assumes that the three schemes that are usedare comparable in terms of difficulty and experiences. In fact, some scriptsmay be easier to remember and more familiar to the children involved.


Moreover, the results may be influenced by the feeding schema beingshorter than the other two acts and therefore easier to reproduce. Futurestudies need to consider the length of the script and ideally should presentthe same script in the different formats.

CONCLUSION

This study questions the assumption that children with autism aredeficient at reproducing symbolic acts per se. When isolated pretend playacts were presented, children with autism were, in fact, more likely toimitate these actions than the other two groups of children. However,when the pretend acts were embedded in a script the children with autismdo less well than the other two groups. These findings are explained bythe suggestion that children with autism may exhibit echopraxia and lackaccess to cognitive strategies that allow nonautistic children to use centralcoherence and narrative structure in the processing of incoming data.These two explanations of the children's performance on these tasks neednot remain discrete. The children with autism may attend to certain as-pects of the single-scheme presentation rather than the whole contextbecause of their lack of central coherence. For example, the children withautism may attend to the action rather than the object used resulting ina tendency to reproduce the action without any objection. Conversely, atendency to give echopraxic responses may hinder the children on themultischeme task as they may reproduce the beginning or end of thepresentation rather than the whole scheme. However, it must be remem-bered that these explanations remain speculative and that heterogeneitywas evident in the number of correct responses given by the childrenwith autism on both tasks. Further exploration of echopraxia and the de-velopment of tests that unravel the notion of central coherence are re-quired to establish the extent of these phenomenon in the autisticpopulation. If they are widespread they may have implications for ex-plaining some aspects of the difficulties children with autism experiencein the development of pretend play behaviors. That is if one accepts theVygotskian notion that imitation may aid in the development of skillslike pretend play (Vygotsky, 1964).

It seems that it is not useful to describe imitation as being simply pre-sent or deficient in the autistic population. Means to explore any qualitativedifference between the imitative abilities of the children with autism andother populations are imperative if we are to understand the cognitivemechanisms that children with autism do have available to them for learn-ing from imitative experiences. One way to begin this process is to expand


380 Libby, Powell, Messer, and Jordan

upon our definitions of imitation and make a formal distinction betweenimitation and the copying or echoing of actions.

APPENDIX A

Material and Procedure for the Single Scheme Task

Objects and actions used

Verbalstatement

Look, it's acup

Look, it's anaeroplane

Look, it's acar

Look, it's ahat

Look, it's abrush

Action

Pretends to drink

Flies the"aeroplane"

Drives the "car"along the table

Places "hat" onhead

Brushes hairwith"brush"

Place-holders

Block

Block

Block

Block

Block

Counter-functional

object

Ball

Book

Plasticshovel

Cushion

Pencil

Emptyhanded

Drinking gesture

Moves handthrough the air

Pushes handalong the table

Gestures placinghat on head

Runs finger overhair

APPENDIX B

Materials and Procedure for the Multischeme Task

Feeding Scheme

Objects. A cuddly toy panda, a miniature bib, a toy beaker, and a smallcloth.

Correct Order. "Look this is a panda and he wants a drink"—Panda ispresented lying down.1. "Sit him up"—Sits the panda up.2. "Then put his bib on"—Puts the bib on the panda.3: "Give him a drink"—Pretend to give the panda a drink from the beaker.4. "And wipe his mouth"—Wipes the panda's mouth with the cloth.

Scrambled Order. As above but in the following order: 3, 2, 4, 1.

Bathing Scheme

Objects. A doll's dress, an oblong block (used as a bath), a small cubebrick (used as some soap), and a halved cube brick (used as a towel).

Correct Order. "Look this is a little girl and she wants a bath"—Showsoblong block with dress on.1. "Take her dress off'—Takes the dress off the block.2. "Put her in the bath"—Places the smaller oblong block on the biggeroblong block that represents a bath.3. "Wash her with the soap"—Rubs the smaller oblong block with the smallcube.4. "Take her out of the bath"—Takes the smaller oblong block off thebigger block and stands upright.5. "And dry her with the towel"—Rubs the small oblong block with thehalved cube.

Scumbled Order. As above but in the following order: 2, 5, 1, 3, 4.

Bed Scheme

Objects. A toy van (used as a baby), a yo-yo (used as a pillow), a shoe(used as a bed), a hat (used as bedcovers), a toy aeroplane (used as astorybook).

Correct Order. "Look this is a baby, he's tired and wants to go tobed"—Shows the toy van.1. "Put the pillow in the bed"—Places the yo-yo in the shoe.2. "Put the baby in"—Places the toy van in the shoe on top of the yo-yo.3, "Put the covers on"—Places the hat over the shoe.4. "Kiss the baby goodnight"—Kisses the toy van.5. "Read a story from the story book"—Turns the aeroplane upside downand runs fingers along it as if reading a book.

Scrambled Order. As above but in the following order: 5, 3, 2, 4, 1.

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imitation of pretend play acts by children with autism and down syndrome

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