Imitation of retarded children by their nonretarded peers

The purpose of this study was to determine whether nonretarded children would imitate the behavior of retarded children who were more competent in an experimental task and to determine whether this imitation would generalize to the selection of the retarded children as task partners in another situation. Each nonretarded observer was allowed to imitate the task behavior of an educable mentally retarded (EMR) model when the model was either more competent than the observer, equally competent, or less competent than the observer in the experimental task. Results indicated that nonretarded observers imitated the behavior of the high competent EMR model significantly more often than the moderately competent model, with the latter in turn being imitated more than the noncompetent model and that girls imitated both low and high competent models more than boys, who were most apt to imitate the behavior of moderately competent models. The data further revealed that competent EMR models were more likely to be chosen as partners on a future game task.