ABSTRACT
Social language learning research has demonstrated model induced changes in the use of passive and prepositional linguistic constructions and in the parameters of verb tense and kernel sentence structure. It should be mentioned that the several groups in general displayed quite comparable baseline means for all question classes. For theoretical reasons, it is important to consider the amount of exact copying, or mimicry, of the model's questions during the imitation phase. Psycholinguists have tended to confine the concept of imitation to literal mimicry of the model's responses. The low frequency of exact mimicry of the model's questions, especially by the implicit instructions groups, suggested that children were abstracting the categorical properties of the question classes, and were not merely copying the model's utterances. Each experiment involved a 2 X 3 factorial design, with the implicit and explicit treatments being compared across baseline, imitation, and generalization phases as trials.
