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Article
Abstract The paper relies on Vygotsky’s thesis that preschool
children in role play are acting in the zone of proximal
development (ZPD). One aim is to specify this thesis with respect
to language development. The empirical investigations show that
language is the central means of creating pretence. By explicit
metacommunication, children collaboratively negotiate the plot,
transform meanings and distinguish fiction from reality. Thus,
metacommunication functions as a verbal frame, determining the
meanings within play. Thereby children overcome sympraxic
language use which is characteristic of toddlers. Another result is
that role play changes during the preschool years. The paper
argues that these changes can be subsumed under a general
developmental phenomenon, namely the transition of
interpsychic into intrapsychic processes. A point of special interest
is why preschoolers, through role play, can act in the ZPD,
although their ability to cooperate with other children is only at a
nascent stage. To explain this, the paper discusses several aspects
of psychosocial development.
Key Words child–child-interaction, decontextualization of
language, language development, metacommunication, role play,
zone of proximal development
Helga Andresen
University of Flensburg, Germany
Role Play and Language
Development in the Preschool Years
The fourth year of life is a year of change (Nelson, 1996; Vygotsky,
1987). According to Vygotsky, toddlers turn into preschool children at
about 3 years of age. He pointed out that role play arises as a new
phenomenon during this time, and postulated that preschool children,
while negotiating shared pretence, act in the zone of proximal development (ZPD). This applies especially to language use, above all to
altering relations between language and its situational context.
Vygotksy argues that until the age of about 3 linguistic meaning is
dominated by the activities the children actually are involved in and
by the concrete objects they are dealing with. The general reason for
this lies in the dominating role that perception plays in toddlers’
minds.
Culture & Psychology Copyright © 2005 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) www.sagepublications.com
Vol. 11(4): 387–414 [DOI: 10.1177/1354067X05058577]
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Culture & Psychology 11(4)
Vygotsky’s assumption fits well with Bühler’s supposition that the
(phylogenetic and) ontogenetic origins of language are empraxic or
sympraxic in kind, emerging out of the Me, Here and Now of the actual
speech situation (Bühler, 1934/1990). This means that early language
use is bound to presently ongoing face-to-face communication and that
linguistic utterances function as part of acting practices, indivisibly
intertwined with their non-linguistic context, as Bruner (1983) has
shown with his analysis of the ‘formats’ which are typical of early
child–adult interaction.
Luria (1967) related Bühler’s supposition to Vygotsky’s developmental theory, characterizing language development as a process of
increasing ability to make use of language in a decontextualized way,
starting with the maximally contextualized sympraxic mode in the early
years and ending with the maximally decontextualized mode which is
required to master written language in all its functions. This notion of
language development has been criticized by various authors and from
various perspectives: for example, as over-emphasizing the intellectual
function of language or as neglecting the cultural conditions and
varieties of reading and writing (for a deep discussion of the latter point,
see Olson, 1994, ch. 2). Since my concern here is to investigate changes
in language use and abilities at the beginning of and during the
preschool years, I shall neglect questions tied to reading and writing.1
Vygotsky’s remarks on the importance of role play for language
development in the preschool years can be understood as assuming
that in role play children go beyond sympraxic language use for the
first time. Several aspects of role play are of special interest with regard
to the ZPD as much as the decontextualization thesis. First, role play
involves interaction between children and not between child and adult,
as is the case with teaching, which, since Vygotsky’s days, has been the
field mostly connected with the ZPD. Secondly, despite its cognitive
dimensions, role play undoubtedly is emotionally based. And, finally,
it is an oral and not a literate practice.
The general question to ask is: which characteristics of role play
might be responsible for its postulated decisive function for language
development? The general answer to this question is: above all it is the
collaborative negotiation of pretence that makes role play so important.
As will be shown later in detail, language serves as the central means
to create fictitious meanings and plots and thus to create the whole play.
For example, by saying ‘Let’s pretend this [pointing to an iron in her
hand] is our phone’, 4-year-old Ingrid transforms the real meaning of the
iron into the play meaning and then uses it as if it were a telephone.2
Transformations like this one are an instance of metacommunication
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because children thereby communicate about the play meanings
(Schwartzman, 1978). Since the verbal devices to transform ‘real’
meanings into play meanings are central to changes of language use
induced by role play, the empirical investigations of this paper will
devote special attention to metacommunication.
The aims of this paper are:
• to empirically analyze children’s language in role play, especially
relations between utterances made within the frame of play, on the
one hand, and metacommunicative utterances about the play, on the
other hand, to answer the question how, especially by which linguistic means, do children generate pretence;
• to investigate changes of role play and language use related to it
during the preschool years; to this end, the play of beginning
preschoolers will be compared to a type of play which developmentally functions as a precursor for role play (Oerter, 1993), and to the
role play of children at the end of the preschool phase;
• to examine Vygotsky’s thesis that preschool children in role play act
in the ZPD and to specify it with respect to language use; and
• to propose explanations of why in the preschool years it is just
through role play that children can act in the ZPD.
In order to set the results of the analyses made within a wider
developmental perspective, the structure of interactions between
preschool children in the play context will be compared with the structure of early child–adult interaction.
As metacommunication is crucial to pretending, functions of metacommunication for play in general and for role play in particular will
be outlined first.
Metacommunication and Play
As Bateson (1955) pointed out, play necessarily is accompanied by
metacommunication because players continuously have to signal to
each other that their behavior is intended as play in order to avoid
misunderstandings, that is, to avoid being taken seriously. So, for
example, while playfully biting a playmate one has to send the
message: this bite is not (intended as) a bite. Otherwise, if the bite were
taken as a real bite, play would turn into serious struggle.
According to Bateson, metacommunication constructs a frame which
characterizes play as play and marks the boundary between behavior
within play and behavior out of play. The metacommunicative message
is paradoxical because, on the one hand, it states that the behavior in
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question should not be interpreted as serious but, on the other hand,
within the play-frame one has to act as if the playful behavior really
were that behavior which it represents.
Cooperation between children playing, for example, as mother and
child, requires both corresponding to each other’s actions as if they
really were mother and child and simultaneously being aware of the
fact that they are indeed acting in roles. So, the play-mother is in the
position to allow or forbid the play-child to do something, which is not
the case between two children. Thus, while within play the ‘child’ has
to obey the ‘mother’, at the level of metacommunicative discussions
about the play’s progress both children have equal rights.
Metacommunication marks the context of behavior or actions; their
meanings must be interpreted relative to the context they are situated
in, namely play. According to Bateson, it is just this feature of play and
metacommunication that makes it so important for development and
learning: while playing and producing metacommunication, children
learn that all behavior is contextual and that meaning generally must
be determined in relation to its context. Children come to recognize this
when they actively construct and mark the play-frame, thus
consciously differentiating between playful and non-playful behavior.3
The empirical analysis below will show that children use several
techniques to construct and mark the play-frame and that the clear
distinction between play and non-play is crucially important for collaboratively negotiating the performance.
Metacommunication in connection with role play serves several
functions. It lays out the boundaries between play and reality, for
example by such formulas as pretend, for fun (German: wohl, aus Spaß,
im Spiel) or even by whole statements like it’s only play, it’s not real
(German: das ist nur Spiel, das ist nicht in echt). By metacommunication
children transform meanings of things, persons, actions and the whole
situation: for example, pretend you are the father, now it is morning
(German: du bist wohl der Vater, jetzt ist es Morgen). Finally, children plan
the next steps of the plot, by leaving the play and then speaking about
what to do next: for example, pretend then you break your leg (German:
und dann brichst du dir wohl das Bein).
According to Bateson, metacommunication may be explicit or
implicit. The examples given above are all instances of explicit metacommuncation because the fictitious character of the play, of its transformations and its actions, is either marked by special verbal entities
like pretend (wohl, aus Spaß) or the propositional content of the utterance in question refers to the play as play. But children involved in role
play also produce implicit metacommunication.
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Griffin (1984) focuses on the metacommunicative processes by
which children conjointly transform meanings. She establishes seven
categories of metacommunicational processes and positions them on a
scale according to the criterion, whether the particular transformation
is located more within the play-frame or more out of it. Totally within
frame are utterances and actions belonging to the category ‘enactment’
(Griffin, 1984, p. 81); they develop the plot without proposing any
explicit tranformations. The meaning of pretend behavior, then, is clear
to the children because of previous discussion or by ‘tradition’, if the
children usually play together and share a lot of play experience.
Totally out of frame are utterances and actions belonging to the
category ‘Overt Proposals to Pretend’ (Griffin, 1984, p. 87), by which
children explicitly talk about the transformed meanings and the play.
The examples cited above all belong to this category. The remaining
five categories of the scale are all cases of implicit metacommunication,
varying as to the degree to which they are within or outside the playframe.
To illustrate implicit metacommunication in role play, one example,
taken from the Flensburg data (see below), will be cited, representing
Griffin’s category of Ulterior Conversation. In a mother–child play the
‘daughter’ says: ‘Then I’ll telephone with my friend Anna’ (denn telefonier
ich mit meiner Freundin Anna) and immediately afterwards starts to dial
and to talk with an imaginary person. By this utterance, the friend
Anna comes into play; she has not been mentioned before. So, while
carrying on the play, the ‘daughter’ gives the information to the
‘mother’, whom she is telephoning. This information is necessary to
jointly develop the play further, and consequently the ‘mother’ takes
up the pretend meaning and adjusts her own behavior to it.
The utterance must be classified as metacommunicative because the
‘daughter’ creates the new person just by this utterance and at the
same time informs the ‘mother’ about it. Otherwise it would be
difficult for the latter to interpret the telephone conversation; typically,
unclear performances lead to questions and discussions between the
playmates, then mostly switch to explicit metacommunication
(Pellegrini, 1982, 1984, 1985a, 1985b).
The utterance in question has to be classified as implicit because the
girl does not leave the play-frame. The utterance would be possible in
a respective non-play situation when a girl rings up her friend and
wants to inform her mother about it, but the exact formulation my
friend Anna would be slightly strange in a real-life situation because
one might expect that the mother would know that Anna is the
daughter’s friend. Both mother and daughter could presuppose this
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knowledge, resulting in just saying the name and dropping the further
information. But in the play situation both persons do not share this
knowledge, because Anna has not been introduced earlier. It is indeed
remarkable that the utterance actually made gives this necessary information; it indicates that the girl really intends to inform her playmate
about it. It also indicates that the speaker is able to anticipate the
hearer’s knowledge and thus to take her perspective. This is especially
remarkable if one realizes the age of the two girls, namely 5;0;16
(‘daughter’) and 4;8;3 (‘mother’); according to Piaget they are both in
the period of egocentric thinking and thus unable to deliberately take
the perspective of another person.
This example obviously shows that implicit metacommunication is
more difficult and more demanding than explicit metacommunication.
An advantage of explicit metacommunication is that the children are
not urged to conjoin and simultanously differentiate between the
perspective of their role, the perspective of their real-life identity and
the perspectives of the co-players, their preconditions and needs. A
disadvantage is that explicit metacommunication interrupts play and
its dynamic flow. On the contrary, implicit metacommunication makes
it possible to stay within play and to continuously develop it (Griffin,
1984).
Explicit Metacommunication and Role Play: Two
Examples
To analyze the relations between explicit metacommunication about
play and communication within play, two pieces excerpted from a
mother–child play between Ingrid (3;10;13) and Hilde (4;2;17) shall be
looked at as examples. Ingrid pretends to be the mother, Hilde the
daughter. The first draft of the transcript has been transferred into a
format that displays the classification of the utterances as out of and
within the play-frame.
The criteria by which to analyze an utterance as explicitly metacommunicative are as follows:
• The utterance contains explicit markers of the fictitious character of
the play action like pretend (German wohl, aus Spaß), thus indicating
that the utterance refers to the play.
• The children call each other by their real names, whereas within play
they address each other by their role names.
• The propositional content of the utterance refers to play, like you are
not playing well.
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• The utterance is directly related to a preceding metacommunicative
utterance, e.g. an answer to a question.
• The child speaks with her normal voice, in contrast to a special voice
while acting in the role.
• The children address each other with the (German) personal
pronoun du (you), whereas within their roles they use the more
distant pronoun sie.
Speaker
Communication within play
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
So what’s wrong child?
I:
H:
I:
H:
I:
H:
I:
H:
I:
For fun my hand is broken, ok?
How’s that? ( ) you’ll have to go to
hospital so let’s pretend you’re crying ’cos
’cos ’cos ’cos you broken something
No but I’m just crying a bit hmn
What’s the matter?
Broke my hand
Then you’ve got to go to hospital
quick
( ) But I have ( )
Yes
H:
I:
H:
I:
H:
I:
H:
I:
H:
Metacommunication about play
but then ( ) you have to lie down quick and
cook with one hand
hold on tight . . . let’s pretend you’re falling
over.
gong gong when you stand up let’s pretend
you’ve broken your leg
Hmn
When you walk let’s pretend you walk ok,
right?
( ) What’ll I do now with my leg?
Yes
First I’ve broken my leg ( )
Now let’s pretend you’re gonna fall down
( ) Ouch
Now you’ve fallen down
Yes
In this piece, evidently, the children act more out of play than within
it. The explicit metacommunicative utterances serve the functions of
planning what to do next and of interpreting the performed play
actions. The children explicitly plan and comment on each single step
to happen in play. The meanings of the play acts—breaking an arm and
a leg—should be fairly clear to the girls because they have nominated
them immediately before. Nevertheless, after Hilde has performed the
acts, Ingrid states what has just happened in order to make totally clear
the meaning of Ingrid’s motions.
The metacommunicative utterances determine and clarify the
meanings of the girls’ actions within play and thereby render their
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cooperation. Clearly, the explicit metacommunicative utterances make
up the context of the utterances and actions within the play-frame.
It is tempting to compare the structure of the girls’ interaction with
the structure of early mother–child interactions analyzed by Bruner
(1983). In those formats, the meaning of each utterance is determined
as much by its place in the course of interaction as by its relation to the
non-verbal action performed simultaneously. Mother and child start to
establish the formats at about the middle of the first year, when the
child neither understands nor produces speech; so, the formats help
the child to recognize that the mother’s verbal utterances systematically refer to the non-verbal context, that is, to the ongoing actions and
to the objects present to mother and child in the actual situation.
Bateson (1955) postulates the existence of metalinguistic rules which
determine how linguistic signs are related to non-linguistic entities like
objects, persons, actions and places. These rules themselves, of course,
cannot be linguistic in nature.
Bruner analyzed the development of mother–child interaction
within the formats over many months and showed that the child
constructs knowledge and anticipation of the interaction sequences
and thus successively internalizes the structure of the format. This
happens during the second half of the first year. First, the child adjusts
his own vocalizations, miming and gestures to this structure until,
more and more, he takes over the active part of the ongoing communication. Ritualization and repetition of the interaction make it possible
for the child to recognize its structure. Above all, it is the close and
fixed relations between verbal utterances and the non-verbal context
that give children the chance to realize that the vocal activity of the
mother refers to something beyond it and to realize the meanings of
the utterances. Therefore the formats may be taken as an instantiation
of those metalinguistic, non-verbal rules postulated by Bateson.
These considerations explain why early language use must be
sympraxic; otherwise, children would have no chance to grasp the
symbolic function of language.4
In the formats each utterance corresponds to a non-verbal act, thus
making evident the meaning of the utterance. In the role play above,
the meanings of the behavior and the utterances within play are determined by other verbal utterances, namely by metacommunication
about the fictitious meanings. Of course, the non-verbal context is also
important for role play, because the children are handling objects. But
between this context and the transformed meanings within play has
been inserted a frame of explicit metacommunication consisting of
verbal signs. Therefore it is impossible to use language sympraxically
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in role play; transforming the meaning of persons, objects, places and
the whole setting necessarily disconnects language and its real, situational context, to define the context anew and to settle the transformed
meanings. This process, I hope to have made clear up to now, is a
verbal one where language is no longer used indivisibly intertwined
with the given context but serves as an instrument with which to create
a new context.
In order to avoid misunderstandings, it must be stated that the
pattern of the first piece of role play, containing very short steps of play
and correlated explicit metacommunication, is neither the only nor the
typical pattern to be found. In order to illustrate this, another piece of
the same girls’ play will be given and briefly commented on.
Speaker
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
Communication within play
H:
Metacommunication about play
Let’s pretend for fun Daddy hmn is dead
and Da hmn Granny and Grandad are away
Here Mummy
I:
Granny and Grandad went away last night
’cos they’re fed up they had to go shopping
and go far
()
( )They’re sick today they’re sick today
they can’t come today but then your auntie
will come for sure then your auntie will
come soon
Yes
H:
I:
H:
I:
H:
I:
Your auntie is here auntie is here.
Maria Maria oh (. . .)
()
Auntie is here your auntie
H:
I:
Maria is here Maria is here she’s
here already will you open up?
Deng Maria? Nobody’s there
I’ll ring up Maria
()
For fun let’s pretend this is our phone
Hallo yes well yes Maria are you
coming today? You’re coming
now good good
bye. ( )
H:
I:
H:
I:
( ) You were speaking with the iron
What?
You were just speaking with the iron
Yes ( ) I can just do magic with an iron
Here, the distribution of communication within play and metacommunication about play shows a different pattern than in the first
piece. At the beginning, in a metacommunicative discourse the girls
conjointly make up and think out a new situation: father is dead and
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grandmother and grandfather have gone out shopping. So, mother and
daughter stay alone at home, but then Aunt Maria is expected to come.
After having worked out this setting, they get into play simulating
Maria’s arrival. Hilde then creates a complication by stating that Maria
is actually not there in front of the door. Ingrid conforms to this
imagined situation and carries on the plot by declaring she will ring
up Maria. But now a new complication arises because in the play room
there is no telephone. Therefore Ingrid decides to transform a toy iron
into a telephone. Typically she then shifts onto the metacommunicative
level, by stating Let’s pretend this is our phone (German Aus Spaß ist das
wohl unser Telefon). Having said this, she immediately goes back into
the play, pretending to have a telephone conversation with Maria. But
again an unexpected complication occurs because Hilde has not
realized the transformation and in an indignant tone states that her
friend has spoken with an iron. So both girls again shift to explicit
metacommunication and Ingrid tries to explain her behavior. Very
appropriately and imaginatively, she calls the transformation ‘doing
magic’.
In this piece it is not the case that each utterance and performed act
within play is planned and commented on by corresponding metacommuncative utterances. Rather, after having achieved the setting the
girls perform their play. The meaning of the utterances and of their
non-verbal behavior during pretend play can be interpreted because of
the foregone negotiations. But when Ingrid wants to use the iron as a
telephone she considers it to be necessary to explicitly perform the
transformation. Hilde’s reaction shows that Ingrid was right in doing
so. Apparently for Hilde it is not self-evident to use an iron as if it were
a telephone. Her reaction is an impressive proof of the supposition that
language is the decisive instrument of transforming meanings in
pretend play. To my mind, both Ingrid and Hilde need the explicit
performance in order to imagine the transformed meaning so that they
can continue their play and coordinate their behavior.5
Finally, I will mention some further points of importance for
pretend play. Hilde’s odd formulation Let’s pretend for fun Daddy is dead
(German Aus Spaß ist der Vater wohl gestorben) very clearly shows that
she does not have in mind the lexical meaning of fun but rather uses
the two words aus Spaß as a formula indicating pretence.
In line 9 Ingrid, playing the mother, says your auntie (German deine
Tante) and not our or the. Her use of this personal pronoun very clearly
shows that she differentiates between the perspective of the mother
and the perspective of the daughter, because the aunt of the daughter
is not the aunt of the mother as well. This kind of differentiation in the
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field of personal pronouns is found very often in pretend play. I shall
come back to this point later on.
To summarize: up to now I have argued that metacommunication is
essential for play and that in role play language is of special importance to create pretence. The transformations are accompanied by the
generating of a verbal frame, inserted between the real situational
context and the meanings of actions and utterances within play. Thus,
while performing role play, children relate verbal signs to other verbal
signs and not just to their non-verbal context, as is the case with
sympraxic language use.6
Pretend play does not have a canonical, fixed form. With increasing
age, children change their play, even during the preschool years. Therefore, the next section deals with such changes. I shall concentrate on
role taking, on the importance of concrete objects for transformations
and play performance, and on explicit and implicit metacommunication. But before this, some information about the data should be given.
The Data
The empirical basis of the analysis consists of thirty-six video tapes of
two children each. Altogether, forty-eight children between 3 and 6
years of age took part in the research project. Of each age group nine
pairs have been taped, combining two girls, two boys and one boy with
one girl, respectively. The children were recruited from three kindergardens in Flensburg, a town situated in the most northern part of
Germany. The videos were taken in play rooms of the kindergardens,
that is, in an environment familiar to the children. The children were
given no special instructions; they had just been told that they were
allowed to play there. We simply hoped that many children would
start pretend play—and so it happened. The children knew that they
were being filmed, but almost no one showed signs of shyness or silliness. They were quite used to being filmed because the colleague who
took the tapes had been present in the kindergardens some days before,
filming the children during their usual activities.
Out of all videos those sequences where the children played pretend
were chosen, transcribed and analyzed under various aspects.
Pretend Play and Role Play
We differentiated between pretend play and role play. Pretend play is
defined as any play including fictitious meanings: for example, taking
a box to be a cooking-pot and building-blocks to be food, thus
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simulating the preparation of a meal by putting the blocks into the pot
and stirring them. Role play is defined as pretend play with role taking.
As criteria for identifying role play there served explicit role taking, for
example Pretend I am the father, or addressing each other with the role
name, such as Here, mother—What’s the matter, child?
A comparison of the amounts in which the children of our study
realized pretend or role play led to the following results. No child of the
youngest group (3 to 4) performed any role play but they did perform
pretend without role play. Both middle age groups (4 to 5 and 5 to 6)
performed role play tentatively twice as long as pretend play without
role taking, whereas the oldest children (6 to 7) performed pretend play
twice as long as role play. Pretend play of the youngest and of the oldest
group differed in many respects. The plays of the older ones were much
more complex, the players interacted very intensively with each other
and their actions were more independent of handling objects.
To illustrate pretend play of the youngest children an example of two
boys—Jonathan (3;4;29) and Marius (3;11;23)—will be described and
compared to the role play of Hilde and Ingrid, in order to negotiate
characteristic changes of play, interaction and language use at the
beginning of the preschool period.
Parallel Play: An Example
The boys have a telephone each; they are sitting side by side on chairs,
watching and imitating each other.
Jonathan takes the receiver and dials; Marius does so as well. They
both repeat their actions until Jonathan simulates speaking with a
(really existing) girl friend on the phone. Marius immediately after also
begins to speak with the girl, repeating the utterances of Jonathan. So,
both boys simulate phoning with someone, but instead of acting
complementarily, by simulating phoning with each other, they perform
exactly the same actions, verbally and non-verbally.
During the course of the boys’ interactions their actions become
faster and faster. There is no simulation of talking any more; taking up
and putting down the receiver and producing short verbal formulas
(hello, bye) make up the whole fun. Overall, broken up by a short
episode with handling a hairdryer, the whole phone play lasts for 5
minutes and 41 seconds.7
The interaction shows all characteristics of ritualized play (Garvey,
1977) and of parallel play. Oerter (1993) understands parallel play as a
precursor of role play. Therefore, parallel play is essentially important
at the developmental transition from toddler to preschool age.
It is typical for parallel play that the children coordinate their
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behavior—watching and imitating each other—but that they do not
cooperate. They do not act complementarily, either on the level of
handling concrete objects or on the more abstract level of verbal and
social behavior.8 This is exactly the case with the two boys.
A few minutes later, the boys shift into a play corner with a cooking
stove for children, toy dishes, and so on. They are not engaged in
parallel play any longer, but they do not cooperate either. The general
pattern of their play is that one boy first does something—for example,
simulates cooking a meal—watched by his peer, and just afterwards,
when he is going to do something else, the other one repeats the same
actions. So again, they do not act complementarily. Their kind of play
is typical for the youngest children of our sample.
By contrast, the two girls, Hilde and Ingrid, clearly act within roles,
as mother and daughter. They act complementarily: for example, one
girl preparing a meal, then passing it to the other one, who has laid the
table and who serves it. And very clearly, they deal with the same
topic; they collaboratively develop the plot as much at the metacommunicative level outside the play-frame as at the play level.
The two boys, as stated, do not perform role play. But nevertheless,
they pretend to talk with an absent person or to cook a non-existent
meal. For them pretending seems to be bound to handling objects in
their real functions (the telephones are real telephones) or to handling
objects which are very similar to those adults deal with, like toy dishes.
So, in the next section I shall look at the functions of concrete objects
for pretend and role play and ask whether changes occur during the
preschool years.
Handling Objects
Concerning actions with concrete objects, all empirical investigations
show similar results (Cole & La Voier, 1985; Elkonin, 1980; Field, de
Stefano, & Koweler, 1982; Garvey, 1977; Vygotsky, 1981). At the beginning of the pre-school years object-related play predominates and the
objects are handled according to their real functions. There follows a
phase of object-related play where the objects are used with transformed meanings (like the iron used as a telephone). At the end of the
preschool years children perform fantasy play which is much more
person-related, much more independent of objects, and makes use of
objects further removed from their real functions. Most investigations
identify the middle phase, characterized by transformations, with role
play and refer to Vygotsky, who stressed the importance of objects for
taking and enacting roles.
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Our data show the same pattern of development. To illustrate the
differences in handling objects at the first and the second stage and to
clarify the functions of objects for creating fiction, the play of Jonathan
and Marius, on the one hand, and of Hilde and Ingrid, on the other
hand, will be examined.
The boys do not produce any explicit transformations as is typical
for the two girls and for other children at the age of 4 and 5 in our data.
But Jonathan, Marius and other children at the age of 3 very often
produce onomatopoeia, which Griffin (1984) classifies as ‘underscoring’. She claims that with utterances and actions belonging to this
category children non-verbally stay within play (e.g. they simulate
pouring a liquid out of a jug into a cup) while verbally they are outside
play. Saying, for example, pssst to simulate the pouring of the liquid
takes the place of the real event and would be odd if it were uttered in
a corresponding real-life situation. According to Griffin, underscoring
allows players to stay emotionally within the play world while at the
same time clarifying and transforming meanings.
The youngest ones in the Flensburg corpus produce underscorings
very narrowly attached to objects. In the example cited, Jonathan holds
a toy jug and a cup in his hands and simulates pouring an imagined
liquid from the jug into the cup. The meaning of his action and even
of the underscoring verbal utterance becomes clear through the objects.
The verbal utterance is embedded in the non-verbal action, it fills a
small gap in this action and its meaning is determined by the objects
and by their typical use.
Older children such as Hilde and Ingrid use onomatopoeia as well.
In the second reported piece of their play Hilde simulates the opening
of a door by saying deng accompanied by rapidly moving her hand in
front and back again. She does not handle any object at all. The
meaning of her underscoring utterance and her gesture is determined
by the verbal context, by the foregone and the following utterances. So,
this is another instance of relating verbal signs to other verbal signs in
role play. By contrast, the meanings of the boys’ underscorings are
determined by objects, that is, the non-verbal context.
Above, Oerter’s reference to the subjective value that things have for
young children has been reported. To my mind, it is clear that Jonathan
and Marius are quite fascinated by the objects and that each one wants
to handle them on his own. In Hilde and Ingrid’s play there is an
episode which shows that, on the one hand, specific objects are very
attractive for them and evoke the wish to act with them, but that, on
the other hand, the girls are eager (and able) to integrate their wish into
the rules of their roles. Ingrid, who plays the mother, has been busy at
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the cooking stove for some time, while Hilde lays the table. After a
while, Hilde obviously wants to work at the stove. She goes there,
remarking that now the ‘daughter’ will start to cook. Ingrid accepts
this with the remark The child is big, she is already able to do so. This
reaction shows that Ingrid feels it necessary to reason that it is possible
and suitable for the daughter to cook. It is an illustration of the cited
observation that during the preschool period role play gets more and
more dominated by action plans and role-specific rules in contrast to
the object-related play of younger children (Garvey, 1977).
Changes in Metacommunication
Several studies have obtained the result that explicit metacommunication about play decreases at the end of the preschool years (e.g.
Auwärter, 1986; Sachs, Goldmann, & Chaille, 1984). Sachs et al. and
Auwärter found that at the beginning of this developmental period the
rate of explicit metacommunication is relatively low, and that it then
increases until it at last declines again. Our data perfectly correspond
to this pattern.
The explanation as to why younger children very rarely produce
explicit metacommunication is easy to give. The reason is that they do
not perform role play at all, so there is no need to communicate about
what is going to happen and how actions and utterances should be
interpreted. In the Flensburg data explicit metacommunication starts
with role play—and then, in the play of the 4-year-olds, it is produced
excessively. Garvey (1977) states that role play seems to be overloaded
with explicit markers of the fictitious character of the ongoing action.
As to our data, this holds for the 4- and 5-years-olds, whereas the 6year-old children produce much less explicit metacommunication. The
examples of Hilde and Ingrid clearly show that for them it is obviously
necessary to assure themselves and the playmate whether they are
acting at the level of fiction or of real life and to speak about the plot
and the transformations they perform.
The finding that older children produce less explicit metacommunication is of special interest. At first glance it may be surprising because
from a scientific view it would be suggestive to propose that explicit
metacommunication demands complex cognitive and communicative
abilities which can be developed only on the basis of complex
communicative skills which are beyond the scope of 4-year-old
children. But metacommunication does not vanish out of play when
children grow older; on the contrary, the pretend play of older children
is much more complex than in the earlier years and contains a lot of
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transformations. Qualitative analyses of the older children’s play in the
Flensburg corpus show that they produce more implicit metacommunication than the younger ones. So, during the preschool period
metacommunication changes from explicit to implicit performance.
As I stated earlier, implicit metacommunication is much more
demanding than explicit metacommunication because the child must
also have in mind planning the plot, transforming, interpreting and
communicating the fictitious meanings, while at the same time
enacting the play. Since transformations of persons, things and situations are central to role play, the children cannot presuppose the
meanings of the actions and utterances, and so these meanings must
be communicated. It is obvious that children, when they developmentally start with role play, need to speak overtly about transformations and plots as they are not yet able to perform these implicitly.
If one looks at metacommunication from this perspective, the change
from explicit to implicit metacommunication during the preschool
years can be ascribed to a general process of ontogenetic development
which has been described by Vygotsky (1986, p. 228). According to him,
internal mental processes arise out of external, interactive and communicative processes in earlier stages. He formulated this phenomenon as the transition from interpsychic to intrapsychic processes and
functions during development.
Thus, I propose, all the changes of play reported here can be
subsumed under this general line of development: children between 4
and 6 gain more independence from concrete objects; the older ones
can act in fiction without imagining specific roles with typical action
patterns as support and they become able to produce and understand
more implicit metacommunication. Their play thus becomes much
more determined by inner plans and processes of interpretation
instead of handling concrete objects and communicating explicitly
about roles, actions and transformations. But when difficulties arise,
the possibility of leaving the play-frame and shifting onto the level of
explicit metacommunication is still at hand (Andresen, 2002; Griffin,
1984; Pellegrini, 1982, 1984, 1985a, 1985b).
Egocentric Speech and Metacommunication About Play
It is remarkable that another mental function, thoroughly investigated
by Vygotsky, originates at the beginning of the preschool age and at its
end has undergone a change from external to internal performance:
egocentric speech, which at about 6 years has altered to inner speech
(Vygotsky, 1986; Wertsch, 1985). According to Vygotsky, the roots of
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language and speech are social, communicative in nature. At about 3
years egocentric speech springs out of interactive speech, thus starting
a process of differentiation between the social and intellectual functions of speech. Egocentric speech serves to regulate behavior: by
speaking to herself the child directs her own actions.
Metacommunication connected with play also fulfills regulatory
functions. While by egocentric speech children direct their own
behavior, by metacommunication about play they direct their own
actional and interpretive processes as well as those of their partners. In
respect to changes of sympraxic speech during the preschool years, both
egocentric speech and explicit metacommunication, are of interest—but
in a different, complementary way. With egocentric speech the child
uses language independently from the dynamic ongoing interaction
with another person. So, this side, the personal one, of the situational
context is absent and the child has to undertake the structuring and
regulating of his actions by himself—whereas in early development this
is done by adults. Young children, using egocentric speech, typically
handle objects—these objects being present to the child in the particular situation. As the child knows the aims and the objects of his intended
actions and as he is acting on his own, there is no need to name them
explicitly. Egocentric speech is thus shortened and syntactically incomplete because the speaker can presuppose a lot of knowledge to be
relevant for the ongoing action. Therefore egocentric speech is still
narrowly tied to the non-verbal context at hand, and word–object
relations predominate (Wertsch, 1985).
In role play, actors cannot take the non-verbal context as given
because the central motive for playing is to transform meanings. Therefore the children must establish the play meanings, and—as the data
show—the younger preschoolers especially have to do so by explicit
verbal communication. So, for role play, while language is still tied to
interaction with other persons, the meanings of the situational context
are at the participants’ disposal, and so the inextricable interrelation
between speech and the non-verbal context of sympraxic language use
becomes loosened.
To summarize: during the preschool age both language-mediated
processes, metacommunication connected with role or pretend play
and egocentric speech, undergo a change from outer, explicit, loud
performance to inner, implicit, silent realization. Egocentric speech
constitutes the beginning of a development in which social, interactive
language (interpsychic) alters into intrapsychic processed language.
With this, the meanings of the situational context can be presupposed
and do not need to be commented on. On the contrary, with role play,
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interactive, social language use is preserved, whereas the meanings of
the situational context shift and must be thematized. Metacommunication, necessary to transform and communicate meanings, changes from
explicit to implicit performance.
Wertsch (1985) stresses that with egocentric speech word–object
relations are still prevalent in children’s speech because they presuppose the context given and because speech then refers and points to it
directly. With respect to the results of Hickmann (1980a, 1980b, 1982,
1985) and Karmiloff-Smith (1979), who analyze children’s language use
while telling stories, he argues that children do not relate signs to other
signs until the age of approximately 8. Only then are children able to
interrelate them: for example, to establish indexical relations within a
text correctly. This—according to Wertsch—is a precondition for the
ability to operate with a new category of objects, namely objects that
are created by language.
But an analysis of children’s role plays clearly shows that already 4year-olds are indeed able to create objects and meanings by linguistic
means: for example, Aunt Maria, in the play of Hilde and Ingrid, who
comes into existence through Hilde’s utterance on the metacommunicative level and whose existence afterwards can be presupposed
within the play. If the children could not create new meanings and
communicate them to each other, role play could not take place at all.
Pellegrini (1982, 1985a, 1985b) investigated the use of endophoric and
exophoric linguistic expressions in two different play contexts, namely
role and construction play. Both types of linguistic entities are deictic:
endophora point to other linguistic entities, whereas exophora point to
the non-verbal context.9 Pellegrini found that with role play children
significantly use more endophoric expressions than with construction
play. Language use related to the latter is similar to egocentric speech
because the deictic words refer to objects and actions that are present
before the children’s eyes. Thanks to the essential function of transformations, this does not hold for role play.
Elsewhere (Andresen, 2002) I have analyzed in detail how children
in role play negotiate personal reference. In accordance with Pellegrini,
one result is that persons (roles taken by the players or imaginative
persons) first get introduced into play by lexemes designating them—
e.g. Aunt Maria, my friend Anna. Later on, during the course of the play,
the children point to those lexemes by endophorically used personal
pronouns. Even 4-year-olds manage to use personal pronouns systematically and correctly, thus differentiating among the persons spoken
about, between their own perspectives as speaker or hearer, and
between their role and their real-life identity.
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These results clearly show that preschool children indeed are able to
create sign–sign relations and—as I hope to have made plausible by
now—must be able to do so if they perform role play. So, in this
respect—the ability to relate verbal signs to other verbal signs—our
investigations may be taken as a specification of Vygotsky’s thesis that
preschool children during role play act in the ZPD.
Questions
Investigations of children’s interactional development show that not
only role play but interaction between children of the same age as well
is a new phenomenon in the preschool years. In our data cooperative
and complementary interaction starts with role play, and role play
starts with explicit metacommunication. The question thus arises, why
is it possible for children in role play to act in the ZPD although their
ability to perform child–child interaction is only at a nascent stage?
Would it not be more expected and reasonable if children were able to
act together in the ZPD only after several years of experiences in interaction with other children of the same age and until then they
developed new communicative abilities by interactions with adults
only? This holds even more as role play is an especially demanding
situation where they have to create and communicate fictitious
meanings and continually indicate whether they are acting in reality or
in fiction.
Approaches to Answers
The children’s motivation for role play is clearly emotionally based.
Vygotsky (1981) locates the roots of these plays in a gap between the
child’s desires and reality: the child strongly wishes to act like an adult,
but at the same time he clearly knows that he really is neither able nor
allowed to do so. This leads to an inner tension that is solved by
producing fantasy and fiction. Vygotsky claims that toddlers’ wishes
are bound to the actual situation and are directed to single acts. If the
child does not get them fulfilled at once he usually becomes angry and
often starts to cry. In contrast to this, preschool children are not as
much dependent on the actual situation as the younger ones; their
wishes are of a more general kind. So they are impressed not only by
single persons; rather, power and ability of adults in general attract
them. Assignments of persons in role play very clearly show this: dogs
are often called doggy, children child, wives wife, and so on. All these
expressions are used like proper names, which is very unusual in real
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life. This shows that, although role plays indeed are inspired by experiences with certain persons, children do not wish to act like a particular person in a particular situation, but rather like a man, woman or a
doctor in general.
Vygotsky (1987) characterizes preschooler’s thinking as perceptual
and yet increasingly generalizing. Both characteristics are perfectly
realized in role play, as will be sketched out now in respect to psychic
and social development.
Role Play and Psycho-social Development
Role play is common play, interactive and social in nature.10 The
examples of Hilde and Ingrid clearly show that the girls conjointly
construct the play; together they negotiate the plot and the transformations, and this takes place explicitly, by verbal communication.
Handling objects and transforming their meanings verbally makes it
easier to pretend, and so do roles. Younger children, especially, prefer
not only familiar, but also complementary roles, like mother–child or
doctor–patient. Their action patterns are related to and clearly differentiated from each other, which makes it easier for the children to act
appropriately. Vygotsky in regard to children’s play states: no roles
without rules; no rules without roles. Preschool children need the
perceptual role concept to follow the action rules. Later, in the school
years, they are able to follow rules as such, but very often rule plays—
e.g. running away and chasing—are accompanied by adding perceptual roles to them—e.g. robber and policeman.
The role concept perfectly corresponds to the concrete thinking of
preschool children. It entails generalizations because it is not tied to the
here, now and me (Bühler) like toddler’s sympraxic language use and
thinking. Rather, in role play preschool children go beyond the given
context of the actual situation and orientate their behavior towards
typical, socially determined action patterns. Compared to school
children, on the other hand, preschoolers’ play is more concrete, tied
to the perceptual role concept.
Mead (1934) understands role play as the first stage of identity
development. That is why children, in taking roles and enacting them,
for the first time come to terms with adults, that is, with those persons
who control and take care of them. In role play children generate a first
distance to themselves because by imagining, for example, being a
mother or a doctor and acting like them, they take the perspectives of
adults on actions that they are used to performing from their own
perspectives as young children. This distance holds even if a child
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plays a child, since then in his fantasy he is not just himself but rules
out action patterns that he supposes to be typical for children.
Berger and Luckmann (1966) in addition to Mead’s Generalized
Other introduced the Significant Other, designating the child’s caretakers, those persons she is attached to and familiar with from birth on.
Note that the first role plays that children come to perform are family
plays (Andresen, 2002; Garvey, 1977). The onset of this play is thus
related to the Significant Other, but as the play’s aim and content are
directed to roles and not to the imitation of single persons, role play
brings about a first orientation towards the Generalized Other: society
comes into sight. Therefore role play can be understood as a bridge:
from interaction as a real child with particular, real persons in intimate
situations to interaction along the lines of socially determined action
patterns, imagined in a pretend world, but nevertheless negotiated
with peers in actual interactions.
At this point it is interesting to look again at metacommuncation,
comparing metacommunication related to early adult–child interaction
to metacommunication connected with role play.
Concerning the formats between mother and child, Bruner (1983) has
shown that when the child knows the structure of the format and
becomes able to take over the active part, the mother starts to explicitly thematize who of them both shall be the actor. So the child, already
at the beginning of language development, learns that action roles are
not fixed but may shift and can be negotiated by explicit metacommunication.11 Those roles, like actor and observer, speaker and hearer,
are tied to the ongoing action in the actual speech situation (Bühler,
1934/1990). But when preschool children by explicit metacommunication raise questions of role taking and role performance, the roles at
their disposal are no longer tied to specific, single, ongoing actions;
rather, they are bundles of socially determined action rules.
This difference between early adult-child interaction and peer interaction connected with role play corresponds to another difference. By
raising the question of whether the child wants to take the active part,
the mother pretends that both partners, she and the child, are equally
competent. But actually it is still the adult who structures the interaction, scaffolding a frame within which the child fits his actions. Even
later on, when the mother extends the format and increases its
complexity, she still builds up the context of their common actions,
which can then be presupposed. Contrary to this, in the role play
context children really negotiate the play and its context conjointly.
Up to now, the question of why preschoolers can act in the ZPD
through role play has partly been answered. The role concept perfectly
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corresponds to their increasing ability to generalize and at the same
time makes it possible to imagine and perform role-specific and typical
actions. They take their nearby environment with familiar persons as a
starting point, whereas the play itself is orientated towards the
future, towards future possibilities beyond the narrow scope of a
preschooler’s life.
Concrete objects and roles help the children to pretend and thereby
go beyond the real situation. Thus, role play stimulates preschoolers’
development, fostering that growing ability to perceptually generalize
which is typical of preschool age.
But still another question is left open, namely why is it possible that
children in just such a demanding situation as role play start to interact
with other children of the same age? That is, why is it in just this
situation that they become able to structure and perform interaction
without the help of older and more competent persons?
Origins of Role Play
Crucial to role play is its emotional origin. As described earlier,
preschool children feel the strong need to act like adults; and it is this
desire that children have in common.
If one observes children playing role play, it is striking to notice how
eager they are to maintain the play—even if they must do or sustain
things they otherwise would not accept. Since they want to act in a
pretend world, they are urged to reach an agreement. The common
wish to pretend, to go beyond the real situation, leads to the deliberate creation of a new type of context—namely fiction. To reach their
goal, the children cannot presuppose the meanings of objects and
actions any longer, but must negotiate transformed meanings. By
planning the play and negotiating the transformations, they happen to
structure their interaction by themselves. So, role play with other
children, forced by strong desires, seems to be especially appropriate
to learning how to responsibly structure interaction and thus to emancipate oneself from the sustaining help of adults.12
Role Play, Language and Context
Finally, some aspects concerning altering relations between language
and its contexts during the first years of life will be pointed out,
summarizing the considerations up to now.
As Bruner (1983) has analyzed in an examplary fashion, adults
involve children in communication some time before children are able
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to understand or produce language. In early child–adult interaction,
verbal utterances are narrowly attached to objects and non-verbal
actions. This tight connection between utterances and their non-verbal
context is essential for the child’s first steps into language and characteristic of sympraxic language use during the earliest years.
With role play, children no longer presuppose the context given, but
rather transform the meanings of persons, objects and actions, thereby
using language as the central instrument to generate the altered
meanings. In doing so, they differentiate between word and object,
between language and its context.
role play 对语⾔的帮助
As stated earlier, while interacting together in role play, children go
beyond sympraxic language use. In using language as an instrument
to generate fictitious meanings they decontextualize language. Decontextualization in this sense does not mean to free language and
behavior from any context, but to deliberately put them into a new
context, i.e. play. The children stipulate the new, playful meanings
overtly. While doing so, they realize that linguistic signs are arbitrary
and conventional—a precondition for being able to use language
flexibly without being bound to specific contexts (Brockmeier, 1997).
Paradoxically, the described process of decontextualization takes
place in a very special, singular situation: the new meanings matter
only during this particular play, between these particular persons.
They are bound to the specific, ongoing interaction of the very playmates, often shifting several times within the same play. Being attached
to concrete, dialogically structured interaction serves as a precondition
for preschool children to go beyond sympraxic language use in the
described way. It is precisely the possibility of enacting fictitious
actions immediately, sustained by the imaginative role concept and
transformations of objects, which enables young children to develop
pretend plots at all. The gap between the linguistic abilities of
preschoolers during play and while producing monologic narratives
(Hickmann, 2003) shows the importance of the interactive, dialogic and
dynamic character of role play.
Above, changes of pretend play during the preschool years have
been understood as an instance of Vygotsky’s rule that intrapsychic
processes originate from interpsychic ones. During the same age,
egocentric speech changes into inner speech, thus undergoing a similar
process of interiorization. Vygotsky regarded the emergence of the
intellectual function of language with egocentric speech as an important developmental step. The analysis of role play shows that at the
same time social, interactive language also changes: children become
able to structure interaction responsibly, without the support of adults,
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and by the same process they decontextualize language, an important
step towards the ability to deliberately have language at their disposal.
Despite all differences, what egocentric speech and explicit metacommunication about role play have in common is to direct behavior
and inner processes. Since Vygotsky’s days, egocentric (and inner)
speech, the ability to self-regulate and the ability to establish relations
between linguistic signs, have been brought together and regarded as
important for the development of metacognition (Wertsch, 1985).
Around the world children five to seven years of age are seen as entering a
new phase of development. Virtually all societies in which there is formal
schooling begin at this age, and quite often children are given new responsibilities . . . . At least part of the reason for adult’s newfound confidence is
children’s growing ability to internalize various kinds of rules that adults
give them and to follow them even in the absence of the rule-making adult,
that is, their growing ability to self-regulate. Another reason is that children
of this age are able to talk about their own reasoning and problem-solving
activities in a way that makes them much more easily educable in many
problem-solving activities: that is to say they are capable of certain kinds of
especially useful metacognition. (Tomasello, 1999, p. 191)
The investigations of role play put forward here draw attention to
interaction between preschool children and argue that it is not only
interaction with adults that contributes to the growing ability to selfregulate, to explore and to follow rules. In addition, in the preschool
years role play between children is accompanied by important changes
in interaction and language use, with children thus promoting each
other.
促进⼉童之间彼此协调
Notes
1. In Germany, teaching of written language starts at school, not at
kindergarden or preschool, normally at the age of 6.
2. Note that the given example originally is produced in German. It is not
useful to translate it literally because each language has its own markers
to indicate pretence. In Germany (especially northern Germany, where my
tapes were made) children mark pretence by the words wohl or aus Spaß,
used as a kind of formula to indicate that now they are speaking about
fictitious meanings. The original utterance of Ingrid was: ‘Aus Spaß ist das
wohl unser Telefon’ (Let’s pretend this is our phone).
3. Watching role play, it is clear that children are conscious about whether
they are acting in a pretend or in a real world. Otherwise, they would get
confused and could no longer cooperate.
4. According to Tomasello, a few months after the beginning of the
formats—namely at about 9 months of age—infants gain the ability to
direct their attention simultanously to an object and to a communication
partner. At the same time they start to recognize the other as an intentional
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
agent like themselves (Tomasello, 1999, p. 68). This process makes up a
precondition of the use of conventional signs because their meanings are
established by common practices between persons and are related to
non-linguistic entities. The triangulation (i.e. the relation between
child—adult—object) not accidentally recalls the organon model of Bühler
(1934/1990), which states that three relations of a verbal sign are essential:
its relation to speaker, to hearer and to the objects and facts of the world.
Bruner’s (1983) analysis of the formats clearly shows that common
object-related communicational practices between child and adult start
before the 9-month revolution (Tomasello, 1999), thus providing a basis of
the triangulation process.
According to Vygotsky (1981), toddlers take words for attributes of things
and thus are unable to detatch words from the objects they refer to.
Paradoxically, this thinking helps the preschool child to transform
meanings by using language. Calling an iron a telephone creates the
image of the fictitious object. So, toddlers’ ways of looking at things and
words are both made use of and superseded by role play.
Concerning the developmental importance of increasing abilities to
generate sign–sign relations and not just sign–object relations, see Wertsch
(1985).
Garvey (1977), who analyzed ritualized play, refers to a ritual with a
length of 2 minutes as relatively long. Thus the example of the two boys is
remarkably long.
The reason for this—according to Oerter (1993)—lies in the subjective
value of things for toddlers: toddlers are eager to get and try things just
for themselves. This fits well with Vygotsky’s (1987) claim that in this
developmental period perception is the dominant mental function.
In Bühler’s (1934/1990) terminology: endophora function within the
kontextliches Zeigfeld that is made up by the verbal context; exophora
function within the dingliches Zeigfeld that is made up by the non-verbal
context.
Older children are able to play role plays on their own, enacting different
roles and simulating dialogues monologically. This ability presupposes an
even greater ability to take and conjoin different perspectives of different
persons at the same time. Preschoolers are still at the beginning of their
development to consciously change perspectives and have to rely on
dialogic and interactive negotiation of role play.
This is an impressive instance of Bateson’s (1955) claim that in everyday
communication the levels of communication and metacommuncation are
actually interwoven. In a more formal sense one can express this by saying
that metacommunication and communication are interdependent due to a
process of mutual feedback (cf. Klüver, 2002).
I think it to be necessary to take this developmental step with peers
because if one wants to leave the given context and to intentionally
determine the context of one’s actions, one must not rely on other persons
doing the job by proxy. Budwig, Strage and Bamberg (1986), analyzing
young children’s growing ability to understand that other children take
another perspective than they themselves, reach the same conclusion:
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‘Learning to communicate across differences in perspectives does not
develop out of interactions with more experienced collaborators alone’
(p. 102).
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Biography
HELGA ANDRESEN is a Professor of Linguistics and Mother Tongue
Education at Flensburg University, Germany. Her research focuses on
language development, written language acquisition and language awareness.
She has published several books in German dealing with these topics.
ADDRESS: Helga Andresen, Universität Flensburg Auf dem Campus,
1 D-24943 Flensburg, Germany. [email: andresen@uni-flensburg.de]
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