PLAY & LANGUAGE AND LITERACY DEVELOPMENT

Play & Language and Literacy Development in Early Years

Play & Language and Literacy Development in Early Years

Language, the most sophisticated human structure of symbols, has its roots both in the preverbal interaction embedded in the social context (Bloom 1998; Bruner and Schaffer 1977), and in the early representational development (Mandler 1998 and Piaget). Social interactional skills and symbolic play competence are seen as being among the most influential predictors of early language development (McCathren, Warren, & Yoder, 1996), and the role of interactional partners, especially parents, is of crucial relevance in this process. Surprisingly few studies have thus far investigated the interrelations between these two early predictors of language development and their associations with parental interactional strategies in normally developing children (Bates; Bates and Charman).

Receptive language and symbolic play are considered salient indicators of representational competence (Piaget and Werner). They are based on similar symbolic-conceptual processes: in vocabulary comprehension a set of sounds stands for an object, person, or activity, and in symbolic play an object or person stands for another object or person (McCathren, Yoder, & Warren, 1998). Empirical studies have confirmed this by presenting strong associations between receptive language skills and symbolic play in the first part of the second year of life (Bates; Beeghly; Lyytinen and Tamis).

Representational abilities are also needed in advanced social interactional behaviors. Intentional communication requires that the child has an internal representation of someone else's communicational intentions or mental states (Leslie and Tomasello 1995). Integration of this type of cognition with infants' social-temperamental qualities is presumably central in intentional communication. In order to manifest social behaviors, a child needs to be both motivated for social sharing and have the necessary abilities for initiating social behaviors. It has been argued that factors related to individual differences in the tendency to initiate social behaviors (e.g., temperamental characteristics) share a common variance with expressive language skills (Bates et al., 1989). This view is supported by the findings of Mundy and Gomes (1998) who showed that a child's tendency to initiate joint attentional behaviors was a significant predictor of expressive language.

In the present study, we investigated the preverbal predictors of later language development at the beginning of the second year of life. This age phase was chosen because at this time, important developmental transitions occur both in social interactional behaviors (Adamson and Whaley) and in play competence (Belsky, Garduque, & Hrncir, 1984). The development of intentionality in social communication evidently proceeds through a continuous process (for review see Reddy, 1999). Infants' ability to coordinate and share attention with others to objects and events, a hallmark of the concept of secondary intersubjectivity, can usually be demonstrated for the first time before 12 months (Adamson; Adamson; Bakeman; Bruner; Butterworth; Corkum; Tomasello 1995 and Trevarthen). The definition of joint attention typically involves the criterion of visual coordination of attention (termed in the present study as “joint visual attention”). However, sharing of attention is not always dependent on visual fixation, but it can be inherent also in ...