It has been suggested that children with autism are particularly deficient at imitating novel gestures or gestures without goals. In the present study, we asked high-functioning autistic children and age-matched typically developing children to imitate several types of gestures that could be either already known or novel to them. Known gestures either conveyed a communicative meaning (i.e., intransitive) or involved the use of objects (i.e., transitive). We observed a significant interaction between gesture type and group of participants, with children with autism performing known gestures better than novel gestures. However, imitation of intransitive and transitive gestures did not differ across groups. These findings are discussed in light of a dual-route model for action imitation. 1. Introduction The relationship between autism and imitation deficits was envisaged long time ago by Ritvo and Province [1], short after autism was originally described in the work of Kanner [2]. The imitative ability has been acknowledged to play an essential role in normal development, as it can be used by infants to acquire and master new behaviors [3, 4]. In recent years, the relationship between autism and voluntary imitation has been investigated more systematically. In their review, for instance, Williams et al. [5] concluded that children with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are consistently impaired in performing imitative tasks relative to children with other developmental delays (matched for chronological age, verbal IQ-mental age and expressive language (see [6, 7]), or to normal controls matched for mental age [7, 8]. ASD children performed more poorly on imitation tasks than matched-to-language controls or younger children matched for receptive language and mental age [8], thus ruling out the interpretation that the imitation impairment is due to a linguistic deficit. Neither can the imitative deficit of ASD individuals be attributed to a defective gesture recognition [6, 8], since they recognized gestures without any trouble. Moreover, ASD individuals’ fine grained motor skills, even when reduced, did not correlate with their observed imitation and praxis deficits [8]. Moreover, irrespective of whether they are low or high functioning, children with autism seem to have difficulties in imitating gestures that disable children and typically developing children do not show [9]. This finding supports the view that imitation deficits are specific to ASD (see also [5]). Whether the reduced ability to imitate of ASD children is a true deficit or a delay in
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