PLAY

Dr Elizabeth Kirk
[Link]@[Link]
@drlizkirk
Questions to consider

• What is play? When did you stop playing?

• Does play promote language development or
are advancements in language ability
reflected in the complexity of play?
• Does play reflect thought (Piaget) or create
thought (Vygotsky)?
• Does play have an important or an
essential role in development?
 Play
• Almost all children play
• Human right
• Between 3 – 20% of child’s time is spent in play
• If young children are temporarily restricted from
playing (for example being kept in classroom) they
play for longer and more vigorously afterwards
(Pelligrini & Smith, 1991)
Running around in the playgroundA young child talking to herself
while laying bed

Doctors and patients Putting a doll to bed

Playing computer games

Pushing toy cars around Pretending

Play to pour tea

into a
teapot

Using a banana as a telephone

A baby banging blocks together
to make a noise
A young child repeatedly dropping
their fork even when handed it back
Board games
 Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff (2008)

Pleasurable and enjoyable

Spontaneous Has no extrinsic goals

Generally
Involves active
engrossing
Play is: engagement

Is nonliteral

Often has a private Can contain make-believe

reality
Types of play

• Locomotor play
• Object play
• Language play
• Social play
• Pretend play
 • Cognitive immaturity
hypothesis: exercise
helps young children
space out cognitive
demands for which they
have less mature
capacities.
• Locomotor play • Evidence: children

3 developmental phases: concentrate better after

active playground-type
• Rhythmical stereotypies
breaks (boys more
(Babies’ kicking legs, sensitive than girls)
arm waving etc)
• Exercise play (preschool (Pellegrini & Smith, 1991)
years)
• Rough and tumble play
(middle school years).
Functions of rough-and-tumble play
• Benefits in physical development (strengthening muscles, fitness)
• Establishes a ‘dominance hierarchy’ (Pellegrini & Smith, 1998)
• A way to test and realise own and others’ strength and establish
their positions
• Does not lead to aggression, it can lead to continued affiliation
(through further games)
• Boys who play fight tend to be popular and have a wider variety of
strategies for solving social problems (Pellegrini, 2006)
 • Earliest form is presleep monologues
• Infants around 2 years of age play with and
practice new words and grammar forms
• Occurs in deaf children with sign (Pettito,
2000)
• Weir (1962) Language in the crib
• Katherine Nelson: daughter Emily
“The broke, car broke, the .. Emmy can’t go in
the car. Go in green [Link]. Emmy go in the
car. Broken. Broken. Their car broken,
so Mommy Daddy go in their car, Emmy
Daddy go in the car, Emmy Daddy Mommy go
in the car, broke, Da … da, the car …
their, their, care broken”

Language
play
 • Babies: play is mouthing
objects and dropping
them

• Toddlers: manipulating
objects (E.g. assembling
blocks) but sometimes
pretend play (feeding a
Object play doll)

• Play with objects allows

children to try out new
combinations of actions
and may help problem
 • < 2 years of age between
child and caregiver

• Increasingly with other

children as social play
increased from 2 – 6 years

• Parallel play: Common in 2 –

3 year olds, children play
Social play next to others with little if
any interaction

• By 3 or 4 years of age a
play group can consist of
three or more participants
as children acquire social
coordination skills and social
 Mother-infant play
• is a uniquely rich context for infant
language learning
• Coincidence of timing between developments in
complexity of play and language
• Mothers’ strategy use changes with infants’
gains in language

Mothers direct or encourage Mothers respond

attention to objects verbally to infants’
initiations
Scaffolding
• Mother/older sibling/peer plays scaffolding role in play
• E.g. mother may give teddy a bath and then hand to infant and
encourage him to bath teddy
• Early pretend play is imitated and follows ‘scripts’
• Realistic props help to sustain play
• As children reach 3-4 they are less reliant on props or a partner to
guide play

• Howes & Matheson (1992) in Slater & Bremner

Child as doctor giving injection: "I give
Scripts
you an infection [sic] ... where would
you like it? In your
arm or your bottom?"
Friend: "In my shoe."
Child: "No, in your arm then."
Friend: "In my bottom.”
Child: "Ok then."
Friend (Patient) bends over, child
(Doctor) pretends to inject into bottom,
patient pretends that it hurts.
Friend (Patient): "Aah!"
Child (Doctor): "Oh it hurted, didn't it?"
Friend (Patient): "Yeah!”
Child (Doctor): "Shall I carry you?" Both
laugh.
Doctor pretends to cut patient open:
"I'm just
gonna cut you open to see if you've got
germ inside.”
FOCUS ON PRETEND PLAY
When does it start, when does it extinguish?
What are the functions of pretending?
Is it important?
Pretend play
• Nonliteral use of an object or an action
• Piaget (1951) recorded play behaviour of his children.

• Inanimate objects are treated as animate (doll)

• Everyday activities are performed in absence of necessary
materials (drink from empty cup)
• Child performs action usually done by somebody else (cooking)
• One object substituted for another (banana = phone)
Source: shutterstock
Developmental course of pretending
• Emerges in 2nd year
• 1- to 2-year olds spend 5-20% of their play time engaged in pretense
activities.
• 4 years: Sociodramatic play with peers (emerges earlier if have more
proficient partner like older sibling or mother)
• The average age people claim to stop pretending is 12 – though many
adults say they have not stopped at all (Smith & Lillard 2012)
• Pretend play does not disappear but “goes underground” as it becomes
socially unacceptable
• Do we ever stop playing pretend?
• “In order to understand paintings, plays, films, and novels, we
must look first at dolls, hobbyhorses, toy trucks, and teddy
bears” (Walton, 1990 p. 11)
Why is pretend play interesting?
“Young children need to adapt to the world as it is, yet in
pretend play they contrive the world to be as it is not”
(Lillard)

• Early instance of child’s ability to use and understand symbols

(Piaget)
• Innate (universal and emerges on a set timetable. All babies in
world begin pretending 18- 24 months) but does it serve a survival
function?
• Relation between pretending and social- emotional development
PIAGET VS. VYGOTSKY ON PLAY
A very brief overview
Piaget 1896 - 1980 Adapting
schemes as a
Constructivist Theory result of new
Cognition evolves through a series of stages information or
experience
• Play is the opposite of imitation
• In imitation accommodation predominates over
assimilation but in play, assimilation
predominates over accommodation
• Piaget saw pretending as evidence of immature
cognitive system: Children assimilate the world
to their own ego in play, rather than changing their
own ideas to meet the demands of reality
Interpreting new
experiences in
terms of current
schemes
Vygotsky 1896 - 1934
• Russian psychologist who said that
development cannot be separated from
its societal and cultural context.
• Also a contructivist theory of
development but language and
interaction with others plays a more
central role.
KEY IDEAS:
• Children develop and learn with the help of adults- by joining
in and sharing an activity with a more experienced partner
(who provides scaffolding).
• The social world determines the structure and pattern of
internal cognition (not cognitive structures as Piaget believed).
• There are no ‘stages’ of development but, with age and
guidance, an increase in the child’s Zone of Proximal
Development:
 Vygotsky
“Play is essentially wish fulfillment”

In play, thought was separated from objects:

actions arose from ideas rather than from
Scaffolding and ZPD
• Unlike Piaget, Vygotsky believed pretend play promotes
cognitive development.
“Play is the source of development and creates the
zone of proximal development”
• argued that play itself created a ZPD where children
behaved beyond their age:
“In play it is as though he were a head taller than
himself”

• Others can create ZPD in play

Vygotsky: Zone of Proximal
Development

ZPD = Independent performance + Assisted performance

ZPD
• Mothers advance play and adapt style based on
child’s abilities:
• Slade (1987) level and complexity of play
increased when mother joined-in with play and
provided encouragement through explicit
suggestions
• O’Connell & Bretherton (1984) 20 months
mothers fostered physical and functional play. 28
months facilitated symbolic play.
DOES PRETEND PLAY PROMOTE
SOCIAL-EMOTIONAL
DEVELOPMENT?
Theory of Mind

Evidence from studies:

Solitary play
Play with peers/siblings
Play with imaginary
companions
Solitary Play and Theory of Mind
• Object substitution with external objects has also been used as a
measure of solitary pretend play
• children play freely with blocks for 3 min and then describe what
they built; higher scores reflect more elaborate descriptions
• Significant correlation with ToM (e.g. Taylor & Carson, 1997) – BUT
language could account for much of the ToM relationship
• Teachers rated children on whether engage in make-believe alone –
this was correlated with ToM (Lalonde & Chandler, 1995)
• Findings mixed
 Play with peers and ToM
• Observed naturally occurring play between children
aged 33 months and their older siblings
• Measured same children’s performance at 40
months on false belief tasks (e.g. the Band-Aid False
belief task)
• Spent more time in pretend play with siblings than
mother – more talk about feelings with siblings.
• Level of pretense (role enactment – but not total
amount of social pretending, diversity of pretend
themes, or explicit verbal role assignment) at 33
months related to later mental state understanding.
Youngblade & Dunn (1995)
Peers’ mental state talk
Pretend play elicits mental state talk important for
development of mind-reading
• Hughes & Dunn (1998) Rate of mental state talk between 3 year old
pairs of friends highly correlated with performance on false-belief
and emotion understanding tasks.
• Mental state talk more advanced and frequent in pairs of girls than
boys
• Children’s friendships provide a rich social context for learning about
others’ minds
• Children with more shared pretend play (rather than shared
deviance) scored higher on ToM (Dunn & Cutting, 1999)
Can play enhance ToM? Training Studies
• Dockett (1998) 2 groups of 4 year olds, 1 received
sociodramatic play training for 3 weeks, other
control group.
• Play training group:
• Significantly increased in frequency and complexity of
group pretence
• Improved significantly more on the ToM tests
Evidence causal link between pretend play and ToM
Does pretend play improve children’s social skills?
• Evidence from
• solitary pretense
• social pretense

• Does more advanced social pretend play predict greater

social skills?
• Does social pretend play training improve social skills?

• “Pretending is perhaps a route to social skills, but

without more convincing evidence it is equally
feasible that social pretending and social skills
emerge from a latent factor like sociability or some
aspect of interaction.” (Lillard et al., 2014,
p.17)
Questions to consider

• What is play? When did you stop playing?

• Does play promote language development or
are advancements in language ability
reflected in the complexity of play?
• Does play reflect thought (Piaget) or create
thought (Vygotsky)?
• Does play have an important or an
essential role in development?
Reading
• Lillard, A. (2002 ) Pretend Play and Cognitive
Development. In U. Goswami (Ed) The Blackwell
Handbook of Childhood Cognitive Development
(p.188-205). Oxford, Blackwell Publishers.
• Smith, P.K. (2011) Play and the Beginnings of
Peer relationships. In Slater, A., & Bremner, G.
(Eds) An Introduction to Developmental
Psychology (second edition. P 453 – 470). BPS
Blackwell