Children learn to perform actions on artifacts in their environments from infancy, but the ways caregivers support this learning during everyday interactions are relatively unexplored. This study investigated how naturalistic caregiver-child teaching interactions promoted conventional action learning in toddlers. Caregivers of 32 24- to…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the play behaviors of children aged 60-72 months with respect to individual differences, cultural differences, and special needs differences. The study employs the basic qualitative research method. Fifty-two children enrolled in four different pre-school classes were given toys that featured diversity. The…

Block-building skills at age 3 are related to spatial skills at age 5 and spatial skills in grade school are linked to later success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Though studies have focused on block-building behaviors and design complexity, few have examined these variables in relation to future spatial and…

Block-building skills at age 3 are related to spatial skills at age 5 and spatial skills in grade school are linked to later success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. Though studies have focused on block-building behaviors and design complexity, few have examined these variables in relation to future spatial and…

The purpose of this study is to reveal the perceptions of today's children surrounding play. A phenomenological method was used in the research, designed qualitatively for the purpose of revealing pre-school-aged children's perceptions of play in their pictures. A total of 97 children being educated in two different preschools in the fall term of…

Research Findings: The current study explored the ethnotheories of 6 Chinese families regarding their young children's play in Shanghai, the most Westernized metropolis in China. A triangulation of multiple data sources was established through in-depth interviews, home visit observations, and 1-week recordings of child's daily play activities. The…

Spatial skills are a central component of intellect and show marked individual differences. There is evidence that variations in the spatial language young children hear, which directs their attention to important aspects of the spatial environment, may be one of the mechanisms that contributes to these differences. To investigate how play affects…

A key prediction of cognitive theories of gender development concerns developmental trajectories in the relative strength or rigidity of gender typing. To examine these trajectories in early childhood, 229 children (African American, Mexican American, and Dominican American) were followed annually from age 3 to 5 years, and gender-stereotypical…

Ten dyads were observed biweekly from 10 to 24 months of infant age while playing together at home with a set of toys. The aim was to examine whether mother-infant coregulation changes over the second year of the infant's life and whether there are individual differences in that process. Normative trends as well as variability between and within…

Fifty-nine healthy infants were filmed with their mothers and with a researcher at two, four, six and nine months in face-to-face play, and in toy-play at six and nine months. During toy-play at both ages, two indices of joint attention (JA)--infant bids for attention, and percent of time in shared attention--were assessed, along with other…

This study examined the impact of play context on the speech of mothers and children. It was expected that the types of speech produced by both children and mothers when they played with toys that involve fine motor manipulation would differ from the speech produced when they played with toys that involve gross motor play. Sixteen children (eight…

Reports a series of studies conducted to investigate possible differences in the exploratory manipulation and play behavior of human infants 7-1/2- 11-1/2 months of age as a function of the attributes of the stimulus, the familiarity of the subject with the stimuli, the age and sex of the infants, and individual differences. (Author/CS)

After an introduction which briefly discusses emotional, therapeutic, phenomenological, cognitive, and developmental perspectives on play, this volume presents the complete texts of all the main lectures and a few short papers that were given at the International Symposium on Play, Play Therapy, and Play Research. Papers in part 1 concern certain…