A Comparative Study of Language Imitation Behavior between Ordinary Children and Autistic Children in Role-playing Activities from the Perspective of Integrated Education

Abstract

Language imitation is the core path of children's language acquisition and socialization development. In the integrated educational
environment, role-playing activities provide a natural situation carrier for children's interaction. In this study, one child with moderate autism
and one ordinary child with strict matching demographic variables were selected. The multimodal recording and quantitative and qualitative
methods were combined to observe a total of 180 minutes in three role-play scenes: "shopping in supermarkets", "seeing a doctor in the hospi
tal" and "family dinner". The data were processed by independent sample t-test, Pearson correlation analysis and topic coding method. The re
sults showed that the frequency of spontaneous language imitation (2.13 times/10 min) in autistic children was significantly lower than that in
ordinary children (5.87 times/10 min) (t =4.236, p <0.001), while the frequency of passive imitation was not statistically different; There was
a significant positive correlation between imitating behavior and social feedback in ordinary children (r =0.683, p <0.01), and a weak correla
tion between autistic children (r =0.196, p =0.327); In terms of non-literal language imitation accuracy, average children (28.76 points) were
significantly higher than autistic children (15.32 points) (t =5.128, p <0.001), and autistic children showed a significant mechanical repetition
tendency. The study revealed specific obstacles such as weak motivation for active imitation, broken social feedback linkage and difficulty in
non-literal language understanding in autistic children in language imitation, which provided an empirical basis for the accurate design of lan
guage intervention strategies in integrated education.