The Influence Of Toy Structure On Children's Social Perspective Taking And Story Telling

Objective:The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of age, toy structure complexity on the social perspective taking and plot structure complexity.Methods:The study is based on a 2(toy structure complexity)×3(age) between subjects experimental design. Eighteen 3-year-old,forty 4-year-old, and thirty two 5-year-old mixed-gender dyads in Zhejiang normal university kindergarten were videotaped playing with either high-structure toy(cooking toy) or low-structure toy(Lego bricks) at their familiar room(dancing room).Videotaped play stories were transcribed and scored according to plot structure complexity and social perspective taking criteria.Results:1.There are significant age and toy effects for social perspective taking(F (2,85)=8.365, p<.01.F(1,85)=14.863,p<.001), no significant Age×Toy interaction effect. The older children engage in higher levels of social perspective taking compared with younger children despite a significant drop in their performance from the high-structure complexity to the low-structure complexity toy condition.2.There are significant age effect(F(2,85)=34.490,p<.001), toy effect(F(2,85) =30.746,p<.001), and Age×Toy interaction effect(F(2,85)=5.138,p<.01) for plot structure complexity. The children produce more structurally complex stories with increasing age. Both 4-year-old and 5-year-old children's play story are at a higher level of plot structure complexity when they play with high-structure complexity toys, while there is no significant result for the 3-year-old children.3. Significant moderate-positive relationships between plot structure complexity level and social perspective taking are found in both toy conditions(high-structure complexity:r=0.461,p<.01.low-structure complexity:r=0.387,p<.01).4. There is significant positive correlation between working memory capacity and social perspective taking in both toy conditions (high-structure complexity:r=0.568, p<.001.low-structure complexity:r=0.448,p<.01), and the same result is found between working memory capacity and plot structure complexity(high-structure complexity:r=0.412,p<.01.low-structure complexity:r=0.427,p<.01).5. Other aspects which affect story telling and social perspective taking are personal storytelling accounts, social bids to observer, expressed emotion and responsiveness, reality-pretend boundary awareness and marking.Conclusions:1. Older children produce more complex story structure, utilize more social cues, and integrate others'opinions better in constructing their stories in comparison to the younger children, while younger children focused more on toy cues.2. The significant relationship between plot structure and social perspective taking seemed to suggest that these two developmental areas affect and support each other.3. The above results about the plot structure and social perspective taking can be explained in terms of working memory capacity.