Investigating learning by imitation in infants and young children, this study addresses itself to the following issues: whether there is systematic accommodation, whether this imitation follows a universal sequence, how the development of an act over many trials relates to the development of indicators over many months, and what the phenomenon reveals about normal infant development in its social context. By meeting the gaze of the investigator, 34 infants elicited a rhythmic burst of 5 mouth movements, opening and closing. After many trials a majority of the infants themselves produced a burst of 2 or more such movements. Although no universal sequence of acts emerged from the data, a general form of accommodation was observed: (1) an orienting to the investigator, (2) a series of imitation of single features of the model, beginning with mouth movement, and (3) a string of 2 or more features of the model, before (4) integrating the features into bursts of mouth opening and closing. (Author/MS)