Thesis (M.A.)--Oregon State University, 2009. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 68-70). Also available on the World Wide Web.

The purpose of this study was to explore imitation in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) by (a) examining the ability of children with ASD to engage in deferred imitation, as compared to typically developing (TD) children; (b) determining the impact of differing time delays on the ability of children with ASD and TD children to imitate simple actions on objects; and (c) examining the role of a verbal prompt on the ability of children with ASD to engage in deferred imitation, as compared to TD controls. Additionally, the role of language in deferred imitation was explored. Participants included 15 children with ASD and 15 TD children. Participants observed object oriented actions and were given the opportunity to imitate spontaneously. Those participants who did not imitate spontaneously were given a verbal prompt and a further opportunity to imitate. Participants with ASD demonstrated fewer spontaneous and total (i.e. spontaneous and prompted) imitations and took more time to do so at a short and a longer time delay, as compared to TD participants. Participants with ASD were given more verbal prompts than TD participants at a short and a longer time delay. Language was related to deferred imitation at a short time delay for participants with ASD but not for TD participants and language was not related to deferred imitation at a longer time delay for either group. / Graduate / 0525 / 0529

How we approach a poem changes it. Recently, it has been suggested that one readerly approach - a bodily orientation characterised by distance, suspicion, and resistance - risks becoming reflexive, pre-conscious, and predominant. This use-oriented reading allows us to destabilise, denaturalise, dissect, defend, and define poetic texts through its manifestation in contemporary literary critique, yet it is coming to be regarded as the sole manner and mood of intelligent, intellectual engagement. In this thesis, I demonstrate the need to pluralise this attentive orientation, particularly when it comes to contemporary lyric poetry. I suggest how an overlooked mode of response might foster a more receptive mode of approach: the 'co-creative' response. Lyric poems mean to move us, and they come to mean by moving us. Recent 'simulation theories of language comprehension', from the field of cognitive neuroscience, provide empirical evidence that language processing is not a product of a-modal symbol manipulation but rather involves 'simulations' by certain classes of neurons in areas used for real-world action and perception. As habituation and abstraction increase, however, these embodied simulations 'streamline', becoming narrow schematic 'shadows' of once broad, qualitatively rich simulations. Poems, I suggest, seek to reverse this process by situationally novel variations of language, coming to mean in the broadly embodied sense in which real-world experiences 'mean'. Readers are asked to 'enact' the poem, to 'co-create' its meaning. Where critique traditionally requires that readers resist enactive participation in the aim of objective analysis, the co-creative response - a response 'in kind' by imitation, versioning, or hommage - asks readers to receive and carry forward the enactive unfolding of a poem with a composition of their own. I assert that, by thus responding with - rather than to - poems, we might foster an attentive stance of active receptivity, thereby coming to understand poems as the enactive phenomena they are.

The aim of this thesis is to verify sentence imitation as a clinical marker of specific language impairment while controlling memory and morphological richness account as an explanation of problems with acquisition of grammatical markers in preschool children with SLI (basis of these assumptions is explained in the theoretical part of this work). The practical part of this thesis is based on the existing research in Hungarian (Leonard et al., 2009). In contrast to results in Hungarian research the support of morphological richness account is only limited in Czech. Children with SLI were as accurate as younger typically developing children in completions of target forms of verbs and nouns, while completions of target verbs were more successful than completions of target nouns. Near miss errors were prevalent, but not without exception, and relationship between substitutions and frequency in non near-miss errors was not proved. The sentence imitation turned out as a good clinical marker of SLI.