USE OF REPETITION TO FACILITATE SPONTANEOUS LANGUAGE-ACQUISITION

The role of repetition as a facilitator of spontaneous language acquisition was examined in a 12 mo. longitudinal study of 3 children: John, Mindy and Ashley. Imitation was first defined in a traditional fashion as the exact repetition of a model utterance, within 5 utterances, without changing the model except to reduce it. During the single-word utterance period, John entered words into his vocabulatory by imitating them and then using them spontaneously, while the 2 girls did not. He also imitated longer utterances than he produced spontaneously while the 2 girls did not. At the same time, John showed the most rapid language acquisition of the 3 children. John did not use imitation to enter new syntactic-semantic relations into his speech during the 2-word stage. When the definition of imitation was broadened to include other kinds of repetitions such as repetitions with expansion, either of the child''s own productions or of those of others, it was found that repetitions played a significant role in the acquisition of new vocabulary and new syntactic-semantic relations in 2-word utterances.