An integrative account of preschoolers' pretend-play narratives: The mediating impact of age, toy structure, and social knowledge

The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine the impact of age, inherent toy structure, and social perspective taking on the spontaneous pretend-play stories of 3- and 5-year-old preschool play dyads. Exploring children's storytelling activities within the natural, expressive context of their pretend play is increasingly acknowledged as a developmentally appropriate and sensitive forum for accessing critical knowledge regarding how children use toy and social information to frame and support their narrative understanding and performance. Fourteen 3-year-old and 15 5-year-old mixed-gender dyads recruited from three child-care facilities located in primarily middle-class neighborhoods in a large urban center in Western Canada were videotaped two times playing with both high-structured (i.e., kitchen center) and low-structured (i.e., Lego and Duplo basic building sets) toys at their respective child-care centers. Videotaped play stories were transcribed and scored using plot structure, inter-textual voice (i.e., stage management, dialogue, and narrator), and social perspective taking criteria. A series of two-way MANOVA's yielded significant age and toy effects for plot-level complexity, toy effects for inter-textual voices, and age and interaction (i.e., Age by Toy) effects for social perspective taking. Generally, preschoolers' play stories progress from action-driven to intention-driven plots with increasing age. As well, children produced more structurally complex stories when playing with high-structure toys. The children tended to use the character-role voice while playing with these latter toys in comparison to more directorial or observer voices in the low-structured toy condition. Lastly, the 5-year-olds engaged in higher levels of social perspective taking in comparison to the 3-year-olds despite a significant drop in their performance from the high- to the low-structured toy condition. Further analysis assessing the relationship between plot structure complexity and social perspective taking suggested that the linkage between these two dependent measures may become increasingly stable with age. Experimental findings are discussed in terms of working memory capacity. As well, other aspects that impact group dynamics were posed as possible mediating factors in children's pretend-play storytelling. The results of this study support an integrated view of children's narrative performance with limits in preschoolers' conceptual understanding or processing capacity circumvented, to a degree, by explicit toy or social cues. Theoretical and practical implications with regard to the findings are offered and implications for future research are discussed.