The cognitive basis of spontaneous imitation: Evidence from the visual world

It is well-established that, when people are asked to identify and quickly repeat spoken words, they show a strong tendency to spontaneously imitate the vocal and/or phonetic characteristics of the stimulus tokens. There is mixed evidence, however, regarding the underlying basis of such imitation: Does it only reflect gestural attunement (as in Direct Realism), or does it also reflect cognitive principles of word perception and memory? The gestural attunement view has face validity, as imitation seems to require tacit knowledge of other peoples' articulatory actions. The role of memory is less obvious, although people can certainly imitate others from memory. In this talk, I will present evidence from three new experiments, pairing procedures from the "visual world" paradigm with a speech production task. Across studies, there is clear evidence that degrees of speech imitation are tightly connected to attention and memory processes that were engaged during initial exposure to spoken words. The results show clear imitation (in naming depicted objects), both with and without spoken words prompting responses, and show strong effects of competition among visual objects: Imitation increases when other potential objects have similar names, or even similar appearances. Spontaneous imitation is both a gestural and a cognitive behavior.