| Abstract | [Introduction]
The intent of the present paper is to reflect on the development of the speech perceptuomotor system in light of the infant’s evident capacity for intermodal (or, better, amodal) perception, discussed by Meltzoff and by Kuhl at this meeting. The central issue is imitation. How does a child (or, for that matter, an adult) transform a pattern of light or sound into a pattern of muscular controls that serves to reproduce a structure functionally equivalent to the model? The hypothesis is that imitation is a specialized mode of action, in which the structure of an amodal precept directly specifies the structure of the action to be performed (cf. Meltzoff and Moore, 1983). |
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