Many authors have described a deficit of imitation of gestures and of symbolic and affective tasks in infants and young children with autism. This deficit is paradoxically associated with echolalia (atypical verbal imitation) and echopraxia (atypical gesture imitation) which in themselves appear to be excessive imitation. We have developed a brief clinical scale, the Imitation Disorders Evaluation scale (IDE scale), to evaluate these different early features of imitation disorders in autism. The present article reports (1) the validation study (inter- rater reliability, factor analysis) of the IDE scale carried out with a population of 30 infants and young children with autism aged from 10 to 46 months, and (2) the results of a follow-up study in which this scale was applied to a group of young children with autism (from 30 to 46 months) over 9 months’ treatment. Factor analysis provided two factors: factor 1, called ‘deficient imitation’, comprising six items describing a deficit of facial, gestural, vocal and affective imitation; and factor 2, called ‘atypical imitation’, including echolalia, echopraxia and variability of imitation. The descriptive results of the follow-up study emphasize the sensitivity of the IDE scale for assessment of improvement in imitation disorders of early autism.
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