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Journal Articles Learning and Motivation Year : 2015

Repeating what children say positively influences their learning and motivation

Abstract

Research reports that individuals judge more positively those who mimic them and are more likely to comply with a request made by a mimicker. We hypothesized that mimicking could also enhance one’s motivation, performance and evaluation of an instructor. Nine- and ten-year-old children were either mimicked or not by an instructor at the beginning of an interaction. Here, mimicry consisted in literally repeating what the children said. Afterwards, performance in a learning task was measured and the interview ended with the evaluation of the interaction and the instructor. It was found that children in the mimicry condition spent more time on a subsequent task and that their recall performance significantly increased. A mimicked child revealed more personal information to the mimicker and indicated more pleasure and ease with performing the task, in addition to perceiving more interest and attention from the mimicker. These results suggest that mimicry influences learning, motivation and evaluation of the learning context
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Dates and versions

hal-01999876 , version 1 (30-01-2019)

Identifiers

  • HAL Id : hal-01999876 , version 1

Cite

Angélique Martin, Nicolas Guéguen. Repeating what children say positively influences their learning and motivation. Learning and Motivation, 2015, 52, pp.48-53. ⟨hal-01999876⟩
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