Pretend Actions and Utterances in the Play of Thirty-Month-Olds. RIEEC Research Bulletin, RRB-21. Working Paper Series.

With reference to Fenson's (1984) study of American children's pretend actions and utterances, this study examined the development of pretend actions and utterances in the play of 16 Japanese firstborn children. Subjects, whose cognitive and language development had been followed experimentally since the age of 6 months, were nonretarded 30-month-olds from middle class families. Videotapes were made of the children's spontaneous behavior with dolls and a stuffed toy, miniature toys, and junk materials. Pretend actions and utterances were grouped into the categories of decentration, decontextualization, and integration. Findings indicated that a majority of children reached the levels of active other-directed, substitutive, and multischeme expressions in both actions and utterances. However, it was suggested that the combination of modeling and feeding utensils would significantly increase the proportion of children showing inventive expressions. Developing skills such as active other-directed actions toward lifelike objects, substitutive actions for physical dissimilarity between the signifier and the signified, substitutive utterances other than naming, and inventive actions of object use were also interpreted to be facilitated by modeling. Since the roles of actions and utterances were not always the same in pretend play, it was suggested that further studies on multimodal aspects of pretend play are needed. (RH)