Do children with autism imitate?

More and more people have become aware of autistic children. Although such children are called star children, it sounds romantic. In fact, such children may not even have the ability to take care of themselves, which is a big challenge for their future life. So do children with autism imitate? Although autistic children can imitate, their ability is very poor. This is also an important direction of the research center. Only by learning to imitate can they have a certain degree of self-awareness.

1. Do children with autism imitate others?

Autistic children and normal children show significant differences in a series of action imitations. The lack of imitation ability is one of the main defects of autistic children, and the imitation problem is also an important direction in current autism research. Children with autism lag significantly behind children with developmental delays in meaningless object imitation, but their overall imitation ability is comparable to that of children with developmental delays. Experiments by Hamilton et al. showed that children with autism performed the same as the normal group in purpose imitation, mirror imitation, and action planning experiments.

Therefore, to be more precise, most research conclusions demonstrate that autistic people have significantly delayed imitation behavior, but we need to be cautious about the performance of each autistic individual. The results of seven studies showed that the gesture imitation of autistic patients lags behind that of the control group. The results of two studies that explored oral and facial imitation showed that the face imitation scores of autistic patients were significantly worse than those of the control group, and both were lower than the imitation scores of meaningless gestures. Only one study involved sound imitation, and the results showed that there was no significant difference between the scores of autistic people and the control group.

2. Is imitating actions a sign of autism?

The ability to imitate movements does not necessarily mean autism. A scientist has discovered that newborns aged 12-30 days have the ability to imitate adult facial expressions. The development of children's movement is based on the morphology and function of the brain. Modern scientific research has found that in early childhood, the functions of brain cells are not yet fully developed, and there is even some proliferation before the age of 2, indicating that the developing brain has strong development potential.

3. Manifestations of autism

The main manifestations of autism are interpersonal relationship disorders; communication disorders, which is commonly known as language delay; stereotyped behaviors, saying fixed words and doing fixed actions to relatives or strangers, and not knowing how to change according to different people, time and place; having a fixed way of placing or fiddling with toys or certain objects; being dependent on certain objects; and having abnormal reactions to the outside world.