An Example of Imitative Behavior in a Nine-week-old Infant.

The capacity of the human infant to reproduce vocal sounds and to imitate social behavior as early as nine weeks of age has not been described in the literature. Valentine (1942) noted a "talking back" stage at two months in his own children, but did not describe it or outline its development. Lewis (1951) states that "when a three-month-old infant hears a sound drawn from his own repertory, his response may resemble it in intonation and phonetic form," and that "this may amount to a rudimentary form of imitation." Pediatric neurologists (Ford, 1960) do not credit the human infant with "volitional activity" until three months of age. The accurate imitation of a mother's vocal sounds and social behavior by her nine-week-old baby is an occurrence which would not ordinarily be expected. Therefore, it seems worthwhile to describe such an incident and to outline its development in an infant who had been under intensive observation in a longitudinal developmental study. In the following case, we had observed the subject as a newborn and noted her striking capacity at birth for visual and auditory responses. We had also noticed that the young mother's early relationship to her infant showed special intensity of interaction in the visual and auditory