Imitation or learning by demonstration is one of the holy grails in robotics. Wouldn’t it be great to show a service robot how to do the laundry or to show an edutainment robot how to clear up the kids’ toys at the end of the day? However, the community is still at a stage where we can only dream from such applications. Most if not all researchers have been concentrating on sub problems of imit...

Imitation and language processing are closely connected. According to the Ease of Language Understanding (ELU) model (Rönnberg et al., 2013) pre-existing mental representation of lexical items facilitates language understanding. Thus, imitation of manual gestures is likely to be enhanced by experience of sign language. We tested this by eliciting imitation of manual gestures from deaf and hard-...

Humans automatically imitate other people's actions during social interactions, building rapport and social closeness in the process. Although the behavioral consequences and neural correlates of imitation have been studied extensively, little is known about the neural mechanisms that control imitative tendencies. For example, the degree to which an agent is perceived as human-like influences a...

OBJECTIVES Defective imitation of meaningless gestures has repeatedly been demonstrated in patients with apraxia and has been interpreted as being due to a deficit of motor execution. There is, however, controversy as to whether some impairment of imitation also occurs in patients with right brain damage. The aim was to compare defective imitation in patients with left and right brain damage an...

Sensorimotor transformation (ST) may be a critical process in mapping perceived speech input onto non-native (L2) phonemes, in support of subsequent speech production. Yet, little is known concerning the role of ST with respect to L2 speech, particularly where learned L2 phones (e.g., vowels) must be produced in more complex lexical contexts (e.g., multi-syllabic words). Here, we charted the be...

Abstract The major aim of the current study is to verify whether an interdependence between self-imitation practice and L2 pronunciation improvement in process second-language acquisition stronger than traditional imitation tasks. 35 Polish students Applied Linguistics (at English level B2+) divided into two groups performed exercises order improve their skills. Three acoustic parameters were c...

The present study compares deferred imitation and early social communication skills among speaking and non-speaking children with autism and children with typical development. Overall, the children with autism showed a lower frequency on measures of both deferred imitation and social communication compared to typically developing children. Deferred imitation was observed at a significantly lowe...

The paper considers an imitation dynamic in the context of Cournot oligopoly. The pure ”imitate-the-best” behavior can lead to an outcome inconsistent with Cournot-Nash equilibrium. The paper extends purely imitative behavior to imperfect imitation in the two-stage model with capacities and prices. This variation in the imitative behavior improves efficiency and makes the Cournot-Nash equilibri...