engleski

Spatial marking in pretend play

Recently, there is an increasing interest in the role of pretend play in children's cognitive, social, and academic development. Latest works emphasize connections between pretend play and social and linguistic competence. Since pretense involves language use and takes place in social context, trends in pretend play seem to be good predictors of language development. Arguments for this hypothesis are found in various observations that indicated that pretend play and language emerge the same cognitive abilities. Observations of cognitive foundations that underlies pretend play and understanding of narrative structures have shown that children use more elaborative narratives and have more advanced narrative structure in the pretend play. As well as narration, pretend play is characterized by the shift of focus from here and now to there and then. This shift is described as decontexualisation. Decontexualisation enables creation of various scenarios that are different from reality. To create an imaginary reality, a child has to put fictive characters in particular time and space. Ways of spatial marking in pretend play are the focus of this study. Spatial marking can be achieved in three ways: using adverb or demonstrative pronoun ; using preposition + noun, and combine: using preposition + adverb or demonstrative pronoun. 4 - to 6- years old children will be observed during their pretend play and their transcriptions will be analyzed. It is expected that older children will show more complex ways of spatial marking, like use of preposition while the adverbs and demonstrative pronouns are spatial markers of younger children.

preschool children ; pretend play ; language development ; linguistic competence ; spatial marking

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