Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior
Open Access

Research Article

Age-related Changes in Imitating Transitive and Intransitive Actions: Changes Going from Low to High Fidelity

Labiadh L^1*, Ramanantsoa MM¹, Landolsi M² and Ouriemi I³

¹Laboratoire TEC Team: Issues and Techniques of the Body -UFr STAPS. 1 Lacretelle Street, 75015 Paris, France

²Laboratory of Physiology, Faculty of Medicine of Sousse, University of Sousse , Tunisia

³LIRSA : Interdisciplinary Research Laboratory Sciences Action, CNAM, 229 rue Saint-Martin, 75003, Paris, France

*Corresponding Author:

Labiadh L
TEC Laboratory Team: Techniques
and Challenges Body -UFr STAPS
1 rue Lacretelle, 75015 Paris, France
Tel: 618088599
E-mail: lazharlabiadh@yahoo.fr

Received Date: June 03, 2015; Accepted Date: July 21, 2015; Published Date: July 28, 2015

Citation: Labiadh L, Ramanantsoa MM, Landolsi M, Ouriemi I (2015) Age-related Changes in Imitating Transitive and Intransitive Actions: Changes Going from Low to High Fidelity. J Child Adolesc Behav 3:223. doi: 10.4172/2375-4494.1000223

Copyright: ©2015 Labiadh L, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Imitation is an interpretative process mostly influenced by the hierarchy process. To examine the imitative hierarchy, eighty-five children aged between 3.5 to 7.5 years were asked to observe and then imitate a human adult model performing intransitive (locomotion) and transitive (with objects) action in: (1) immediate imitation, (2) short term deferred imitation and (3) long term deferred imitation. Whereas some of action sequences were necessary for achieving goals, some others were unnecessary to pursue these goals. Children’s responses were recorded, scored in dichotomous data (1-0), and then transformed in performance percentages. Results showed that: (1) for intransitive actions, all children imitated the goals in all imitation conditions. (2) For transitive actions (implying both necessary and unnecessary action sequences), there was a significant effect of age in long term deferred imitation. The 3.5 age group obtained lower scores than the other age groups for necessary sequences. For unnecessary sequences, the 3.5 and 4.5 age groups obtained lower scores than the older age groups, both in short term and long term deferred imitation conditions. The current results mostly sustain the children’s fidelity to extract the goal-critical elements and ignoring useless ones.

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