Relationships between Pretend Play in Preschool and Later Language Skills

Participants

In this study the play of 48 children was evaluated in preschool when they were 4 or 5 years of age. Three to five years later, children’s semantic and narratives skills were evaluated. In preschool, 16 of the children had been identified as at-risk for learning difficulties and had scored between the 1^st and 25^th percentile on the Miller Assessment for Preschoolers (Miller, 1982). The other 32 children were typically developing.

Assessments

Child-Initiated Pretend Play Assessment (ChIPPA). The Child-Initiated Pretend Play Assessment (ChIPPA; Stagnitti, 2007) is a norm referenced standardized assessment of the quality of a child’s ability to self-initiate pretend play. It was designed to be used with children aged 3 – 7 years in order to understand how children are developing in their ability to initiate and organize play. The ChIPPA is administered with the child and examiner sitting on the floor in front of a “cubby house” made of a sheet thrown over two adult chairs, and is divided into two play sessions. One session assesses conventional imaginative play as the child is presented with a set of conventional toys. The other session of the ChIPPA is the symbolic play session and the child is presented with unstructured objects such as a shoebox, a tin, a flat stick and a cloth. Each play session is 15 minutes and each 15 minutes is divided into three 5-minute segments. For the first 5 minutes the child is invited to play with the play materials or toys with the examiner giving no other instructions. For the second 5 minutes the examiner models five play actions with a doll-like toy (for example, doll walks, doll waves, doll drives the truck, doll drives the box, doll has a drink from the cone). For the final 5 minutes, the examiner is again passive and encourages the child to continue to play.

The scoring items on the ChIPPA include (a) the elaborateness of a child’s play which involves the child’s ability to logically sequence play actions – The longer the sequence of play actions, the more complex and organized the play and (b) the ability of the child to use an object as something else (object substitution). The following play measures were used in analysis:

The School Age Oral Language Assessment. The School Age Oral Language Assessment (SAOLA; Allen et al., 1993) is an Australian assessment of oral language, designed for use with children from preprimary to 4^th grade. The SAOLA assesses three skill areas of oral language: (a) Semantic Organization, which evaluates skills of categorization, comparison, classification, analogical reasoning and word knowledge; (b) Narrative Re-tell, which assesses the child ’s ability to re-tell a story presented through a textless picture book; and (c) Metalinguistics, which assesses reflective awareness of oral language such as phonological, word, syntactic, semantic and pragmatic knowledge. Only performance measures from the Semantic Organization and Narrative Re-tell section of the SAOLA were used in the study.

Results

Discussion

The study’s results support the hypothesis that elaborate play, that is logical sequential actions in play, and the use of symbols in play of preschool children are significant predictors of semantic organization skills and narrative retelling abilities of children in elementary school.

Why might there be a relationships between play and semantic skills? Through pretend play, children can develop concepts about semantic diversity such as agency, location, action, and possession (Shore, O’Connell, & Bates, 1984; Tamis-LeMonda & Bornstein, 1994) are gained. Pretend play and semantic language share the common feature of relational meanings between things. Just as children enact relations between agents, actions and objects during pretend play, through their lexicons, children make predictions about the relationships, objects and events. In pretend play, children learn to classify, compare, and reason – all semantic organization skills. They develop an understanding that objects do not fit a single category. They learn to recognize shared features and attributes of objects and use this knowledge in classifying toys. For examples, drinking utensils may include a jug or cup (functional); the category of drinking utensils may include glassware or plastics, and the category of drinking utensils can be further subdivided based on part-whole aspects such as cup/handle, glass/no handle.

In play, children use objects flexibly – they can use the same object for different purposes or different objects for the same purpose. For example, the child may need something for the teddy bear to sleep on. This represents the superordinate category. Subordinate items are those the child chooses to use as the bear’s bed – a box, book, or piece of paper (all flat objects can symbolically represent a bed. Or the bear may need a blanket and the child classifies a range of objects that share the attribute of being able to be used as a cover (e.g., handkerchief, towel, sheet of paper). The child may compare and contrast the functionality of the items. This type of play involves logical sequential actions (putting the bear to bed, putting a cover over the bear) and the use of symbols (unstructured play items to be used as the blanket). These play behaviors are two items on the ChIPPA identified as significantly predicting semantic organization skills in children in early elementary school.

Why might there be a relationship between play and narrative retelling behaviors? The correlation indicated that the use of symbols in play had a stronger relationship with narrative retelling than elaborating pretend play actions. Of the two play abilities (i.e., elaborate play and substituting objects) a child’s ability to substitute objects was found to be the best predictor of Narrative Retell scores.

Children exhibit decontextualized ideas in their pretend play (Nicolopoulou, 1993) just as they exemplify decontextualized language in their narratives (Newman & McGregor, 2006). For example, when a child substitutes an object in play, that is using symbols in play, the child is suspending the reality of the object or decontextualizing the meaning of the object. Thus, when pretending a box is a car, the reality of the box is suspended while the child plays with the “car” or, alternatively, the child plays with the box “out of context” because the child treats the box like a car. In the same way, when relating a narrative, the child is free to use language that extends beyond the here and now. Retelling narratives and pretend play both reflect what Deacon (1997) described as the creative and constructive activity of symbolic representation and what Culatta, Page, and Ellis (1983) referred to as an integrated communicative performance. Specifically, during both play and narrative activities, in order for the child to construct a coherent mental representation of the situation described in the play scheme or the narrative, the child must efficiently identify and infer temporal and causal relations within the story context (Cain, Oakhill, & Bryant, 2004).

This study provides evidence for a relationship between pretend play skills and later language skills and those language skills are linked to literacy skills. Play also is associated with greater social-emotional skills and self-regulation (Bedrova, Germeroth, & Leong, 2013; Rosekos, Christie, Widman & Holding, 2010)