Imitation Skill in Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder and Its Influence on Their Language Acquisition and Communication Skills

Autism spectrum is a lifelong neural growth disorder, manifested as problems in social interaction, communication, and imagination along with limited and repetitive behaviors and interests. Furthermore, autistic children show clear defects in imitation skill. Acquiring imitation skill plays a vital role in the growth of social communication such as language, common attention, and play. Given the increasing prevalence of autism in advanced societies and lack of speech therapies for language enhancement and the role of imitation in the development of language, the purpose of this study is to evaluate recent studies in the field of mimicking effects on the different aspects of language in autistic children and determining the most effective and appropriate way of teaching imitation to improve the language and communication skills in these children. This research is a review study aimed at collecting the relevant data from 2000 to 2017 in the field of imitation and its impact on language and communication in children with autism by searching the Google Scholar, Science Direct, Scopus, PubMed, SID, and IranMedex databases. In this article, 13 related studies were found from 2000 to 2017. Out of these studies, two studies were carried out in Iran, and 11 other studies in other countries. Two research studies compared imitation ability of autistic children with other disorders, and other studies examined the effect of imitation on different aspects of language acquisition. All studies have shown that imitation influences on different aspects of language acquisition and enhances pre-lingual communication, such as the infant’s gaze at mother’s eyes, development of perception and expression language, improvement of understanding language application skills and syntax, including the number of verbs and the increase of the verbal production of vocabulary and the phrase.