Importance of Play

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It is easy to forget that much of a child's language develops within the context of play with an adult or with other children. Play can be an ideal vehicle for language acquisition for a number of reasons (Sachs, 1984):

• Since play is not goal oriented, it removes pressure and frustration from the interactive process. It's fun.
• Attention and the semantic domain are shared by the interactive partners, so topics are shared.
• Games have reciprocal role structure and variations in the order of elements, as do grammars.
• Games, like conversations, contain turn-taking.

In languages as different as English and Japanese, levels of play and language development appear to be similar (McCune-Nicolich, 1986; Ogura, 1991). Play and language develop interdependently and demonstrate underlying cognitive developments. This relationship is presented in the table below.

Initially, both play and language are very concrete and depend on the here and now. With cognition maturity, however, they both become less concrete. At about the time that children begin to combine symbols, they begin to play symbolically in which one play object, such as a shoe, is used for another, such as a telephone. In like fashion, symbols represent concepts.

Children often attempt to involve their parents in this pretend play. As playmates, parents can show by example how to play. Often, parents contribute running narratives of the play as it progresses and provide children with the basic problem-resolution narrative or story model. Even 2-year-olds can learn the basic problem-resolution format, as in "The doggie barked, so Mommy let her go outside." In general, the number of sequences in children's play is related to the syntactic complexity of their speech (Bates, Bretherton, & Snyder, 1988).

Thematic role playing and accompanying linguistic style changes begin at around age 3. By this age, children possess generalized sequential scripts of many familiar situations (Nelson, 1986). At first, a child's role represents himself or herself. Later roles are projected on other persons and dolls. Eventually, an object may play a reciprocal role.

By age 4 a child is able to role-play a baby, using a higher pitch, phonetic substitutions, shorter and simpler utterances, and more references to self. At about this time, a child begins to role-play "Mom and Dad" differently. In general, mothers are portrayed as more polite, using more indirect requests, with a higher pitch and longer utterances. Role-played fathers make more commands and give less explanation for their behavior. Prosodic and rhythmic devices are the first stylistic variations used by children, followed by appropriate content and then syntactic regularities.

Although the language used in solitary play is not typical of a child's performance, social play is quite different. In social play, language is used explicitly to convey meaning because of the different realistic and imaginary meanings of props ("This'll be a phone") and roles ("You be the daddy"). Language is used to clarify ("You can't say that if you're the baby") and negotiate ("Okay, you can say it if you want to"). Play themes consist of sequential episodes whose organization increases with a child's age (Galda, 1984; Pellegrini, 1985).