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Developmental trends in children's pretend play.

¹Department of Psychology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

Child: Care, Health and Development

|January 1, 1991

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Children

Area of Science:

Child Development
Developmental Psychology
Cognitive Science

Background:

Pretend play is crucial for cognitive and social development in early childhood.
Understanding developmental trends in pretend play informs educational and therapeutic interventions.
Symbolic competence, evident in pretend play, develops throughout early childhood.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate developmental trends in children's pretend play between 2-6 years of age.
To examine changes in pretend action and speech separately, focusing on decentration, decontextualization, and integration.
To explore the role of single-scheme versus multischeme combinations in symbolic competence development.

Main Methods:

Assessed pretend play behavior in 90 children (18 per age group, 2-6 years) using Duplo Lego toys.

Related Experiment Videos

Analyzed pretend actions and speech for indicators of decentration, decontextualization, and integration.

Examined the complexity of action and language combinations (single-scheme vs. multischeme).

Main Results:

Proportions of decentered and decontextualized acts, action integrations, and play themes increased linearly with age.
Multischeme combinations were more indicative of symbolic competence development than single-scheme combinations.
Linear age trends were not observed in language measures; decentered utterances and themes were individual-specific.

Conclusions:

Symbolic competence in pretend play shows clear age-related development in actions but not language.
Multischeme combinations are key indicators of developing symbolic organization in play.
Future research should consider individual language differences, especially in language-impaired groups.