Imitation is an important form of social learning.The acquisition of children’s motor skills and the establishment of emotional connections all rely on imitation.Imitation is a natural ability of ordinary preschool children,but the preschoolers with autism were poor at mimicry.In order to explore the factors influencing the imitation ability of preschool children with autism,many studies have been carried out from different perspectives.Based on the analysis of the existing literature,the following deficiencies were found in the existing research: First of all,most of the current research on preschool autistic children’s ability to imitate involves a small number of subjects,which leads to the conclusion of the study is not high reliability;Second of all,Part of the study lacks the control group,affects the conclusion validity,Thirdly,Deficit fully studied the mechanism of autistic children have not been.In order to solve the above problems,this study aims to use meta-analysis technology to screen and integrate the existing literature on autistic children’s imitative ability,The purpose of this research is to evaluate the mimicry ability of children with autism and to explore the mechanism of the mimicry ability of children with autism.At the same time,a case study was conducted to evaluate the imitation ability of a preschool autistic child to test the reliability of the meta-analysis conclusion and enhance the adaptability of the individual.Based on this,this study used meta-analysis technique to analyze the literature from 1990 to 2020 about the comparison of imitation ability between preschool children with autism and ordinary preschool children,a total of 13 articles in English and 4articles in Chinese were selected,involving 294 preschool children with autism and 314 normal preschool children.This study uses descriptive statistics to encode the basic features of the literature at home and abroad,transforms independent findings into specific effect quantities,and analyzes the effect quantities of all the studies.At the same time,based on the consideration of the existing research,this study selected the test environment,task type,task complexity,cultural background and publication time as moderating variables,to explore the imitation process of preschool children with autism.The results showed that the main effect of imitation difference between preschool children with autism and ordinary preschool children was significant.At the same time,subgroup analysis showed that test environment,task type and cultural background had significant moderating effect,while task complexity and publication time had no significant moderating effect.At the same time,the Conclusions and meta-analysis of case studies are consistent.As a whole,the conclusions of this study are as follows:(1)when the sample size was enlarged,the ability to mimic the average level of pre-school children was significantly higher than pre-school children with autism,the difference above the average level.(2)This imitation difference is influenced by test environment,task type and cultural background.In other words,children with pre-school autism showed poor imitative ability in high-social-level imitative tasks and environments.(3)The imitative differences were not influenced by the complexity of the task or the time of publication.This indicates that the level of preschool autistic children’s cognitive participation does not affect their imitation level.(4)This study supports the social motivation hypothesis,that is,the involvement of social motivation influences the imitation ability of preschool autistic children.(5)The case report shows that environment and interpersonal familiarity affect the ability of autistic children to imitate,and the ability of autistic children to imitate can be improved by enhancing their adaptability to environment and interpersonal environment. |