The relationship between elicited imitation and production of language is confusing in the available psycholinguistic literature. The research reported in this paper attempts to clarify this relationship. Severely mentally handicapped children (mean chronological age, 137.12 months, mean vocabulary age, 43.47 months) were involved in a series of studies in which they were asked (i) to imitate a wide range of linguistic stimuli, including single words through to complex sentences and (ii) to talk to the experimenter about a series of picture stimuli. It was concluded that the children used linguistic strategies on both tasks indicating that similar psycholinguistic skills are involved.
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