The ability of severely retarded children (mean CA 172.6 months, s.d. 11.0; mean Vocabulary Age on the English Picture Vocabulary Test 65.8 months, s.d. 2.95) to both imitate and comprehend language (the latter in the picture-choice situation) was investigated. In addition latencies to response in a picture-choice comprehension situation were analysed. The independent linguistic variable for all tasks was syntactic complexity. The types of error and response latencies suggested that as syntactic complexity increased, both imitation and comprehension became more difficult for the subjects. The usefulness of imitation as a psycholinguistic assessment technique is discussed.
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