One of Oxford Science Adventures’ founding coordinators is Hannah Hobson, a PhD student who works on imitation. Hannah is interested in children’s imitation skills, particularly the imitation skills of children who have difficulties with language and communication. This includes children with autism spectrum conditions (ASC), and specific language impairment (SLI). Using the data she collected during OSA, Hannah has been able to compare children with autism and/or language difficulties to other children their age, to assess whether their imitation skills are impaired. Previous research had shown that imitation was often impaired in autism, but only a few studies have examined imitation in SLI. Hannah wanted to investigate whether imitation difficulties might be a place where autism and SLI overlap.
Hannah investigated two types of imitation – verbal imitation and motor imitation. In verbal imitation tasks, children repeated made-up words that they heard. In motor imitation tasks, they copied movements or postures that they were shown. Being good at verbal imitation is related to language skills – children who had autism but whose language skills were normal for their age repeated words like typically developing children, but children with language impairments showed difficulties, whether they were autistic or not. In the motor imitation tasks however, the children with autism and language impairment did okay. Some motor imitation tasks were impaired, but Hannah thinks this could have been due to the children with autism and language impairment having motor difficulties generally (which would obviously impact their ability to imitate). This would suggest that imitation is not just one thing, but that different types of imitation can be separated out.
Hannah is still hoping to do more analyses and write up her findings for scientific articles. For now though, she’s just submitted her PhD thesis, and is about to start a new research job in London! So it’s good bye from Hannah - she’ll definitely miss organising OSA!
Hannah investigated two types of imitation – verbal imitation and motor imitation. In verbal imitation tasks, children repeated made-up words that they heard. In motor imitation tasks, they copied movements or postures that they were shown. Being good at verbal imitation is related to language skills – children who had autism but whose language skills were normal for their age repeated words like typically developing children, but children with language impairments showed difficulties, whether they were autistic or not. In the motor imitation tasks however, the children with autism and language impairment did okay. Some motor imitation tasks were impaired, but Hannah thinks this could have been due to the children with autism and language impairment having motor difficulties generally (which would obviously impact their ability to imitate). This would suggest that imitation is not just one thing, but that different types of imitation can be separated out.
Hannah is still hoping to do more analyses and write up her findings for scientific articles. For now though, she’s just submitted her PhD thesis, and is about to start a new research job in London! So it’s good bye from Hannah - she’ll definitely miss organising OSA!