So, um, thank you for coming today or for listening whenever you're listening. So, I am Evan Kidd and I am a, uh, developmental psychologist and a linguist, and I work at the, uh, Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. And a lot of my work has been looking at the relationship between symbolic play, so one form of play and language acquisition. So this is work that my colleagues and my students and I have been doing for the last or odd years. So I'm just gonna tell you a bit about that today. But before I talk about symbolic play, I'm just gonna talk about what is play in general. So it turns out that it's actually quite a tough thing to define, and scientists have been arguing about how to define play for, for decades. So while we all seem to agree, when we see it, what play is, it's actually a slippery concept. And the best way that we seem to be able to capture it, or it's essence is through a criteria based approach. So, um, play should be intrinsically motivated, so it's not constrained by external rules or social demand. So you can make up the rules as you go along. It should be non-literal so that behaviors don't have, uh, normal or literal meaning all the time. It has positive affect, so it's enjoyable. Um, it's flexible. So there's variation in, uh, its form and its content. And this is really one of the core defining features of play. And the other one is that it is a means end. So, uh, it has a means end criteria, and so the performance is more important than the outcome. So the journey in play is much more important than what children are trying to achieve, or adults. Um, given that we don't stop playing all our lives, we just play in a different way. So, uh, there are different types of play that can be identified as emerging in different, uh, times in development. So one of the first forms of play is social contingency play, and this emerges in the, within the first six months of life. So these, um, when children, uh, get a lot of enjoyment from games like Peekaboo, um, where there's, uh, enjoyment in response to other people's, um, quite surprising and play-based, uh, actions. Then there's sensory motor play. So these are activities based on sensory motor properties of objects or, um, or the body. So a classic one is banging or dropping blocks when children, um, are starting to get more of their fine motor skills going. Then this moves on to things like object play. So classic things like Lego molding clay, and building houses of cards, which emerges, um, later on as children's fine motor schools, uh, get a little bit better. There's also language play, and this, uh, can go right from the beginning of when children start to produce, sounds like with babbling, um, right through to, uh, when they're even learning literacy. Uh, and in between there are things like crib talk. So, um, people who have children out there might recognize that, that their child may well have been talking to themselves, uh, before they went to sleep, even though there's no one to talk to. Children take quite a lot of delight in, um, in playing with language, um, even when other people aren't around. The fifth is physical activity play. So this can be exercise, play like running, jumping, climbing trees and rough and tumble play, which can be, um, with other people or other children. So chasing and play wrestling and things like that. Um, this is beneficial for development because, uh, it, it, um, enables children to, um, get gain strength and mobility and all those kinds of things. But things that rough and tumble play, even though we might look down upon them for things like, um, play wrestling or chasing and things like that actually have a social component as well, because when children are engaging in playful banter, what they're doing is learning social signals from other people too. But this brings me to, um, symbolic or pretend play. I call it symbolic, uh, play, but, um, other people might know it as pretend play even a fantasy play. So you can use those interchangeably. And this is the non-literal, uh, use of objects, actions, and persons. And this is what I'm going to be talking about today, in particular in its relationship to language. So, symbolic play, once again, is the non-literal use of objects, actions, or persons. Typically in the spirit of enjoyment, children start to engage in symbolic play in the second year of life around to months. It depends on the child when this emerges, and it's quite simple in the beginning. So we have things like object substitution. So this, uh, little fellow here is pretending a banana is a telephone. Telephones don't look like bananas anymore, but this is a classic textbook example. And this is object substitution because what he's doing here is he's using the, um, object, uh, for a function that it's not intended for. So he's pretending the banana is a telephone. Then, uh, this leads into things like sociodramatic play. So a classic example here is of, um, a tea party. So when, um, uh, this young girl here is either is playing a tea party with her, uh, with her stuffed toys, but it can also be done with other humans also. Then there's other types of play like, uh, role play. So children often impersonate, um, superheroes or other people. And finally, something I will talk about briefly today is imaginary companion play. So these are all examples of symbolic or pretend play, play. So symbolic play itself is, uh, quite a fascinating behavior. Um, it appears to be an evolved behavior in the sense that it's a property of humans in general. So it's universal, it's affected by culture. So it, the play themes are different, uh, for children in different cultures, but it seems to be the case that there are no human societies that don't engage in some form of symbolic play. Um, it appears in a set schedule. So, uh, children begin to engage in this rudimentary, say, object substitution, like I showed you before with the banana and the telephone, um, around, uh, to months. So somewhere in, within the second year of life. And as I said, it's unique to humans. And this leads us to, um, what Angeline Lillard is called, the conundrum of symbolic play. So she writes, young children need to adopt, adapt to the world as it is, because really as humans, one of our jobs is to, uh, learn how the world works and to learn how the world works in reality. But in pretend play or symbolic play, children contrive the world, um, to be as it isn't or as it is not. So this begs the question, if children are engaging in loss of symbolic play and a lot of their play is symbolic or pretend to play particularly, uh, after, um, they start to engage in things like object substitution, it seems to be one of the most enjoyable forms of play. Why would they do so? Why would they engage in symbolic play when really their job as humans is to learn how to, um, how to, uh, understand the world as it really is? Now? It seems to be the case that after lots and lots of research over, over the years, um, that we've come to the conclusion that, uh, symbolic play might be an especially framed situation where children can learn important social and cognitive skills or socio cognitive skills. So symbolic play has been associated. So engaging in symbolic play has been linked to language, which is really what I'm going to talk to you about today. But it also importantly, has been linked to other skills that also related to language such as, uh, theory of mind. And so theory of mind is an ability to understand, or at least to predict what other people are thinking. Um, and this is a really important uniquely human skill as well. And a symbolic play has been linked to it. Um, it's also been linked to executive function. So executive function of those skills, like, um, planning, like, um, engaging and completing concept, uh, complex tasks depends on brain structures that are, are called, uh, that are linked to executive functioning. And symbolic play has actually been linked to executive functioning as well. So, um, as I said, my talk is gonna be about language mainly. Um, and language is important because it's a crucial predictor of a range of outcomes. So language is a very good predictor of academic achievement, for instance. So the question that we've been asking over, um, the last years or so, is how and why are symbolic play and language related? So that's what I'm going to tell you about, um, over the next, uh, or minutes or so. So the first thing that we have to do is establish that they are related. Uh, and so over the years, uh, lots of people have conducted a lot of, uh, small studies and they've reported say, correlations between measures of symbolic play and measures of language. And when those two are associated, we can, we can say, well, there seems to be something there, there seems to be something in, um, playing that might also be related to language. So, um, what a, uh, PhD student of mine and I, Sarah Quinn, um, did is, uh, don't worry about these graphs, um, I'll explain them. Um, we looked at all of these studies. We conducted what's called a meta-analysis. So we conduct, looked at all these studies that, uh, tested children's symbolic play and their language and looked at the association between the two. And what we found is that when we averaged all these studies together, and this is what a meta-analysis does, that, um, we found that the average association is, uh, something like. And now that might mean nothing to you. It might mean something to you if you've done some undergraduate psychology or statistics, but what that actually means is that above chance, these two skills are associated with each other, and they're associated with each other to a, a fairly good degree. And so what this, um, figure on the left hand side, um, is showing is that all of the individual, um, studies you can see are right of that line, that's their results. And that means that if they're right of that zero line, then there is this association and this other figure, this funnel plot as it's called, um, is just showing the same, um, the same data represented, uh, slightly differently. So, um, overall we have strong evidence for this robust symbolic play language relationship across development. And this was important because when we were doing this study, um, a, a while ago now, there were some, uh, people that were really questioning whether this is actual association. So we look, because we looked at all of the studies that have been conducted, and we combine them all, we can be confident that this link actually exists. However, an association is not an explanation. So, uh, in a lot of the other research that we've been doing, we've been trying to explain why symbolic play, the particular behavior of symbolic play might be related to children's language development. And we've done this in, um, infants, and we've also done it in school aged children. So what I'm gonna show you first is, um, quite a bit of, uh, data, well, quite a bit of results from a, um, uh, a corpus, uh, of interactions between, uh, caregivers and infants aged months, and once again when the infants were months into contexts. So, uh, what we had is a very, this is a very, very simple study that yielded a lot of really rich data. So what we did is we got our, um, our participants, there are about odd of them, so caregiver and children. And we simply said to them, uh, c, come and play with some toys and, uh, for minutes and we'll film you. And so unbeknownst to them, there were two play sets. Uh, one was a functional play set. So these are, these don't lend themselves to symbolic behaviors because there's a function to them. So there's a, um, some musical instruments there. There's a puzzle, there's a, um, hammer and pegs, and there's a board, um, it's called an Etch of Sketch in Australian English. I can't remember what it might be called in British English, I'm sorry. Um, there's a function of drawing or writing there. And then there's a symbolic play set, uh, where there's things like cooking utensils. There's, um, a mobile phone that children can talk on. There's, um, a, a teddy bear and some other nonrepresentational toys that lend themselves to children to do things like object substitution or create pretend scripts like cooking and having a tea party. So all we did here was, um, we gave the toys one toy set, uh, to the, um, to the pair for minutes. We took those toys away, we gave them the other set, and when we transcribed all of their interactions, and we coded them for things like their gestures, and we looked at how often they attended to each other and things like that. So we coded it many, many times, um, in the hope of seeing that there might be, when there are symbolic content in interactions, there might be differences that would be, um, create a rich context for children to learn and use language. And this is actually what we found. So, um, in the symbolic play context here, we've got some more telephones. Um, uh, what we found is that the infants had what we call increased joint attention. So joint attention is when, um, the parent or the caregiver and the child are jointly looking, um, and engaging in an object. And so this was, joint intention was three times higher in symbolic play than it was in function. Functional play joint intention is really important for the early, um, beginnings of language acquisition when children are learning things like, um, common names for things like nouns, what we found in the symbolic play context, as well as increased gesture, um, between the, um, in both the parents and the children. So, um, these, this, there were especially more representational gestures. So, um, pretending that you had a telephone or pretending to eat something and stuff like that, we saw increased use of interactive language. And I'll show you an example of that in a moment in comparison to functional play. And importantly, we also saw that there was a greater to and fro in, in between in conversation between the caregivers and the children. So the children were having more conversational turns because they were getting more conversation elicited, um, by their caregivers who are asking more questions. And it shouldn't be surprising to anyone that, um, if you're engaged in more conversation and you are beginning to learn language, you're probably gonna learn language faster. And this is exactly what we found, um, in comparison, in the functional play context. We saw les joint attention, we saw decreased ge, um, gesture, and we saw in the parents, instead of the parents engaging in the children in questions and getting them to respond, there was a greater use of, uh, in command. So do this, put this here. And these are actually negatively associated with language acquisition. So why is the symbolic play context important? We think it's because, um, this ambiguous context of symbolic play, um, requires children and caregivers jointly to create meaning. And by, if they're to create meaning, they've gotta negotiate, for instance, what this means in this context. And this means they're, there's more, um, conversational terms and more questions. And this means that the children are really being tested at the higher level of their language skills, and this improves their language skills. In the functional play, we don't see these behaviors, and we think this is because, um, the joint activity that the children are engaging with in has a, um, a pre-specified meaning. So if you are, if you are, um, completing a puzzle, then you'd kind of know what you're doing and you're just really, um, uh, you're just trying to work out a, a common task that doesn't have any sort of symbolic content. And this is why the parents' language was really more aimed at behavioral control. So I'll give you, um, some examples or two examples, um, one from the symbolic play context of an interaction and one from a functional play context. This is when the children were two. So, um, this is from a symbolic play context. And what you have here, I'll just read it out for you. Here, we have the mother saying, oh, what is he doing? Referring to their dad who wasn't there? And then the child saying, going to the shop. And then the mother then follows in and says, um, oh, has he gone to the shop? And the child says, yes. And then she's, um, following it even further and is asking, what is he doing, um, at the shop? And the child says, um, data roles. And this is referring to, um, to the sister. So the child has brought the sister who also isn't there into this interaction. And the, and then the mother follows in more and says, ah, um, is he getting roles for, um, your sister? And, um, and she says, okay, and then is that for your lunch? And then the child says, yes. And then they finally finish this interaction with the mother saying, oh, yummy. So what we see here is something interesting. Um, the mother is asking a lot Yes. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And that fits in really nice. of questions as we can see here. And in doing so, she's allowing the child to be sort of an equal partner in the creation of this, um, particular play episode. So the child here is deciding on the content of what's going on, and the mother is scaffolding the exchange by inviting the child to elaborate on the scene. If we compare this, uh, to a functional play context, uh, where the mother and the child are completing a puzzle, we see, um, less, uh, interaction on behalf of the child or less, um, yeah, definitely less interaction on behalf of the child who doesn't speak much at all. So the child just starts out and says that orange, um, these are really young children, right? So they're not, they're not very grammatical just yet. And then the child says, pop it here. And then the mother says, oh, no, no, um, look, this is yellow. And um, then she goes on because of orange. Is this, I see this, this is orange, isn't it? This is a orange. This is orange. Yeah, that border is orange. Um, and these are yellow, aren't they? So, um, really what's going on here is the mother is, uh, kind of directing the child. She's teaching colors, which is fine. Um, so isn't, this isn't a bad thing per se, but, um, notice where in symbolic play, the child was an equal conversational partner, adding and elaborating on the content. In this exchange, the child is a student and is being directed, and, uh, this reduces her capacity to use language to contribute to the ongoing conversation. So as an interim summary, um, the symbolic play, uh, we found is significantly correlated with language across childhood and in infancy. We think it constitutes something of a zone of proximal development. And for those of you who are aware of, um, Vygotsky, um, you'll know that this zone, um, the concept of a zone of proximal development, where, um, we think that symbolic play acts as one, because what it does is, um, lets the child with scaffolding behave at their highest developmental level, um, in terms of language. So it provides a rich context full of communicative opportunities. And children often take the lead in exchanges and are therefore promoted to a more equal footing in conversation for this rich and often self-directed. Yet, scaffolded context may underlie the symbolic play language link, especially in infancy. So that was, um, infancy and a whistle stop tour through, um, a lot of the work we've been doing, uh, over the last decade. Um, but now I wanna talk about play and later language. 'cause it isn't the case, although probably pretend play really peaks around four, although that's the argument. I'm not sure if that's actually, um, been, uh, proven. Um, children still play well, well into their, um, um, primary school years. And, uh, our meta-analysis suggested that the play language link is still there when children are at least, um, aged, uh, six or seven. I think we went up to six actually. Um, so, uh, is there an association between play and later language? And it seems like there is. So, um, this brings me to the notion of imaginary companions. I'll tell you a little bit about some of the research that I've done and what other people have found. So we use imaginary companions here because they're what we'd call high fantasy children. They're children who engage in, um, lots and lots of pretend play. But for those of you who don't know what an imaginary companion, well, I'm sure you know what an imaginary companion is, but how do we define it scientifically, I suppose? So the way we define it is a, uh, very vivid, imaginary character. So it can be a person, an animal, or an object with which the child interacts during his or her play, and daily activities, although the companion does not actually exist, it is very real to the child who endows it with an individual personality conscious, and consciousness. As a consequence, the child often refers conversationally to the companion and indicates its presence throughout the day. So, as I said, um, children with imaginary companions, uh, play a lot. And so it stands to reason. If they play a lot and they, um, they are really engaging in a very high form of symbolic play, then they, this might confer some advantages to them in their, uh, language and conversational skills. And this, this seems to be what we find. So, uh, we conducted, uh, a study, um, quite some time ago now using a method called referential communication. So the way this goes is that, uh, an experimental or an adult sits at a desk with a child, and they each have a book of pictures. And, uh, the pictures, the children are told, um, that they have to tell the, it's a kind of a game, and the children have to direct the adult. And the adult also takes turns to direct the child to find a picture in their book, um, from an array. So I'll show you an example here. So in this item here, what the child is told to do is to describe the, um, picture in the red border to the, um, experimenter. And so they can only use language to do this because you may have noticed in that schematic, um, that they can't see each other's books because there's a barrier between them. So what the child has to do here is recognize that the, uh, experimenter needs to know some important, unique information about that particular clown. So it needs to say, you need to find the clown with the, uh, with the green color and the top hat, because that's the only uniquely identifying information besides the border. But they can't say anything about the border because they're told that the, uh, the book for the experimenter doesn't have a border around it, or the target picture doesn't. So what we found in this study, and this was children with imaginary companions aged three years and eight months to six years and five months, and we compare them to match children without imaginary companions, we found that children with imaginary companions were better at doing this. And we think this is because, and engaging with an imaginary companion in engaging in lots of symbolic play means that you are better able to understand the mind states of other people. So in this case, the children were better able to understand that the experimenter needed to know and, but didn't know some unique information about this particular picture. Referential communication isn't the only, um, skill that children with imaginary companions have been shown to perform higher on than children without them. Um, another one is narrative language. Uh, so narrative is storytelling, basically. And narratives really are the height of spoken language, and they're also very important as a foundation to be able to learn to read. But narratives are hard for children to, um, to produce because, uh, they're not something that, uh, they're something that have complex structure. So they have a sequential linear plot. A narrative has a beginning, a middle, and an end. And this, um, varies cross-culturally. So, um, narratives, um, structure will be different, somehow different in other cultures. Um, they have to be cohesive, so they have to make sense from sentence to sentence, and they have to have audience design. So the person you're telling the narrative to has to understand it. So it has to be comprehensible and tri. And Reese found, they did a similar study to ours, but they used narratives and they found that children with, uh, imaginary companions produce better quality, um, past event narratives. And they were better at retelling a narrative than children without imaginary companions. Uh, this suggests that children with, uh, imaginary companions, um, have better narrative scripts. And they explain this, um, by saying that the, the story like nature of play, because play has a story like quality to it, symbolic play has to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, and often has resolutions is very narrative like. And so they argued that engaging in lots of imaginary play was, uh, related to, um, children's narrative language, um, because of this overlap between these, um, these two behaviors. Um, so we've also been interested in, in narrative language, but in, um, educational setting. Uh, so this is some work that I did with, uh, my colleague Karen Stati, uh, um, in, uh, who works in Melbourne, uh, in Australia. And so, um, Karen, uh, has done a lot of great work on, uh, pretend play and children's pretend play. And she's worked with, um, one particular school that has a play-based curriculum. And so what we were doing, we were approached by the school in order to assess whether or not their play-based curriculum, um, had advantages, um, to a standard curriculum that wasn't, um, play-based. So, um, what we did in a quasi experimental study is that we recruited, um, children in, uh, who went to schools with a, that had a traditional, um, didactic type curriculum. So, um, and you can tell which one the didactic classroom is. Um, so the traditional curriculum involving didactic teacher led learning, and then we compared it to this sort of experimental play-based school, um, which was, um, informed by a whole bunch of ideas around, um, how play is related to formal learning. So, um, the way they do this is, um, uh, first of all, I guess children are seen in this particular play-based school as competent beings, um, who learn through the world, learn about the world through interaction with competent adults. So this notion of scaffolding, um, that we're talking about before. So what happens is, um, when children come to school, uh, in the morning, they, um, do what's called a plan do and review. So they choose the topics that they wanna learn about, and the teacher helps them construct play episodes on the, on those topics. Uh, so for example, um, in the classroom, the children have explored things like, uh, what has a sun got to do with growing? And the teacher's role is to find their students' strength and assist them with improving, um, students' learning through scaffolding and direction and explicit teaching. Uh, so when the children were exploring the effect of the sun on growing, the teacher facilitated the children to explore placing that included night and day. And in doing this, the children was extending the children's logical thinking, uh, through their play. So what we did in, um, in these, with these two, um, different types of curricula is, uh, we measured the children's narrative, um, language skills and their play skills when they first entered their reception class within the first month of school. And then we went back six months later and we tested their narrative and play skills again to see if that improved and to see if there was a relationship between these two skills. And what we found, um, is that, uh, in the, uh, play-based school, the children's, um, play skills improved, um, much more than the children's traditional classroom. And their narrative skills also improved much more than the children in the traditional classroom. So, um, these graphs here show the, um, the improvement in average units, you can think about it. Um, and so what we see is that the bar graphs are higher for the play-based, um, children than they are for the traditional, um, uh, the children, uh, attending the traditional school. And what we also found is that these, um, two, the, the improvement in both their play and their narrative language was actually, uh, related. So they were correlated with each other, and this might not be an accident. So, uh, Nicolopoulou has argued that play and narrative are two complimentary modes of communication. And so it stands to reason that increases in one. So increases in play should lead to increases in narrative language. Um, and the final study I'll talk about is, um, also related to narrative language. And, uh, this is an intervention rather than looking at, uh, at, um, different curricular types like we did. So Baumer and colleagues, um, found some data that's sort of consistent with what we found in our experimental study. So what they did is they, um, had used what's called a Playworld narrative intervention. So they got 32 children aged five to seven years, and they, um, divided them up into two groups. One group was the Play World Intervention. So what happened here is that the children read a book, and I think the book was, uh, the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, um, they reenacted the scenes, some scenes with costumes and props. So, um, so they're really engaging in kind of play-based reenactment. And then they had a discussion about it, and then they did some drawing and painting or pretend play whatever they wanted to do after they'd done that. Um, in order to effectively, um, I guess think about and reinforce some of the things that they'd learned, the control group, um, read the book. Um, they had a discussion and they did some silent reading and drawing and story writing, but effectively there was very little play in this intervention, uh, in the control group, sorry, in comparison to the Play World Intervention. And what they found is that the Playworld intervention resulted in significant growth in the children's narrative language skills. So showing once again, that adding this, um, notion of play and this notion of pretense is related to the children's, uh, narrative language. So that's, um, pretty much everything I have to say. I'll just wrap it up now. Um, so hopefully what, uh, I've, um, convinced you of is that symbolic or pretend play is important for language development. It's not just important for, um, really early language development, but it seems to be important for when children are even in their early childhood school years. Um, a key driver is of this relationship, and this has been one of the real things that we wanted to find out and why this is the case. And we think it's because the rich communicative context that symbolic play creates and guided by the scaffolding of competent others. And this really means then that harnessing the power of play can create the right environment to improve children's language and their language related outcomes. So, um, a lot of the papers that I've talked about here, um, are available from this website if you'd just like to, um, you can click on the link or you can go to it and download those papers. Um, also there's a great paper that I'd, um, also recommend you reading if you're interested in further reading. And that's this one by, uh, Weisberg et al., which has guided play principles and practices in the journal current directions in psychological science. So thank you for your attention and, um, that's it. Lovely. No, that was, that was brilliant, Evan. That was brilliant. It was just absolutely spot on as well for Tells toolkit and kind of the audience that we're working with. Um, so I just wanted to kinda ask you a few questions. Um, we have a big issue with children in the UK coming to school with very low levels of language. Um, and in particular it's been a big issue after Covid. Um, I just wondered what you had to say around that, and also where you've seen maybe changes in society and things that have happened over time in terms of symbolic play and play in general and that kind of link with language. Yeah. So, um, the study that we did with the play-based curriculum, actually the had a, they had a really forward thinking principal, um, so head teacher and it, it was a, a, a school that was in a low socioeconomic area, and they, they were really noticing that their children came in with low levels of language. And so that's why they, they, uh, decided to put together this, um, play-based curriculum. Uh, and it was in concert with a, an educationist educationalist called Karen Walker. Okay. Which I didn't mention in, in, uh, in, in the talk. So, um, I think that actually play as a context creates a non-threatening environment for children to come in with low who have low levels of language. And there's some other evidence to, to tentatively suggest that children, um, who may be come from more deprived areas or lower socioeconomic status may benefit more from these types of interventions. Then say children from high SES who probably get a lot of that support at home and, and from many other enrichment, uh, enrichment activities that they engage in. So I think that, uh, if anything, especially after covid, if children are having, uh, coming in with low levels, then it's probably even more important to have these types of, um, of play-based, uh, uh, curricular or play-based activities, um, for children in say, reception and, and, and things like that. Rather than worrying about formal kind of learning of say, um, of, um, of letter sound patterns and things like that. I think those things can come after once they build a foundation of spoken language. Yeah, no, I think that's a really important message to get across because I know that in some schools I think there's that worry of children falling behind and often they're put into more interventions and more groups to help 'em catch up, but that means that they're taken away from the play of their friends. So yeah, I think that's a really important message to get across there. In terms of the research that you've done, have you seen any, have you kind of looked at different times of ways that children acquire language and maybe the play is one of the more powerful ways of doing that? Um, we haven't, I guess the thing about language is it's so complicated. So one of the, yeah, and, and because it's really, well, as we all know, it takes, even though children are very good at learning, it does take a long time for them to be, to be competent conversationalists. So, um, I guess it's really hard to do a study where you look at all of the possible contributing factors altogether. Um, but I guess the result of our meta-analysis really showed that the, the, that symbolic play is one of the stronger associations that might exist actually, and more, not only stronger, but um, more, um, uh, persistent actually. So, um, so yeah, I guess that's the best answer I can give to that question. Um, because uh, I would be, um, selling my colleagues out if I said other things didn't matter as well. Yeah, yeah, Yeah. That's it. And also you could see the big difference between that more formal teaching and formal setting and that more play-based learning. So that's kind of real evidence towards that working. Yeah, and I think that the important thing about the, especially in educational context too, is to understand that, um, a couple of things. And the first is that when children are able to learn through play, they have agency over what they're doing. So to be able to choose what they're doing means probably they're gonna learn better. And that's a super, super important thing to remember. And when you are only, um, only directing them, then they don't have agency. And potentially that means that they're not going to be so as interested or they might not be more as receptive to learning. But the other side of it as well is that just letting them, like play only is not gonna let make them learn either. So the thing is, it's sort of molding those two things together, and that's why that scaffolding is super important, um, of having that competent other person to understand the children's agency, understand their choice, but really pull them along into the, into the learning environment. Yeah, yeah, no, definitely. Um, one of the things we kind of like put at the heart of everything that we do at Tels Toolkit is this idea of quality interactions, which I felt like kind of fed into like a lot of what you were saying, whether it's that scaffolding, that kind of social element that serve and return and that kind of like joint attention. Um, what's the best ways or the best advice you can give to teachers and practitioners that are watching this and the ways that they can support children in this kind of symbolic play in the things you've been talking about? Yeah, I'm, I you are probably a much more over it than me as a practitioner. I kind of like, I'm the person who just studies it, uh, more than anything else. So in terms of tips, I'm not sure I could, um, I, I'm not sure I would step outta my lane and, and, and tell people how to do their job. But I guess the only thing that I could say is just these guiding principles of, um, of, of recognizing the agency, but also understanding that of your role as a facilitator in, in, in those processes. Uh, Yeah. And were there things that you found where the data was showing you that really huge impact was happening with language, but there, what were those kind of common threads? And I'm kind of guessing it was that back and forth, that warmth, that re like relationship between people? No, it was some, it was, I didn't show the slide and it was in an earlier version of the talk, but what we find that is most, um, that comes through the strongest is, uh, the back and forth is what we call the conversational turns. So the, when, when conversation is swapping between the caregivers and the children, that's when, um, when it happens a lot between particular pairs, those children are learning language a lot faster. And so yeah, it really is that, that um, that uh, elevating the children to, um, these equal, uh, conversational partners where you're letting them, uh, as I showed in that example, you're letting them, um, guide the content, but you are, um, but you are also taking them or, or you are taking their lead. And extending those interactions means that effectively the children are, um, getting more opportunities to speak and if they have more opportunities to speak, they're probably learning more. We talk a lot about kind of like used to questioning and kind of taking on more of a role of play partner rather than like where you were talking about that kind of the different toys where you had something that was a lot more closed and then you had things that were a lot more open where people were just playing together and it was more chat and things through rather than, what is this and what color is it? And you know, can you tell me how many you've got? And kind of those kind of, the use of questions and the use of the way that they're talking I think has just really kind of taken on more of that play partner. So you could see that coming through all the things that you were saying, but yeah. Yeah, yeah. I think that's really good. Um, is there like more information you might have around, um, 'cause it was quite interesting when you were showing some of those toys that were quite closed. Um, and like I imagine that there's probably some toys that can be quite limiting. And I know with my own daughter, I've got a 2-year-old, um, and it doesn't matter, there's often things that you put out and she uses them in very different ways to the way that they're intended and she's way more happy playing with a stick than she is with something that's been bought from a shop. But is there any kind of research information or things that you've kind of looked into? We chose, we did a bit of research on those, uh, on how to choose those toys. Uh, and so, um, what we wanted to do was choose things in the past had been shown to elicit these what we symbolic play behaviors. And the really cool thing about it was a lot of those things were everyday objects that there were, that were related to, um, actually things that adults do, right? So cooking or talking on a telephone. And so that's the really interesting thing about symbolic play. It's always grounded. It's not often ground. Some of the kids are metric companions are definitely not grounded in reality, but especially early on it is grounded in reality. And what children do is they use the, the, the, um, avenue of pretense in order to think about the world and test hypotheses about the world. So if you are cooking something, you can cook something and it doesn't matter what you're doing, you can change your mind about what you're cooking in that moment or whatever. Um, you can decide you're drinking tea or a milkshake, right? It does all of those things. That's the power of of play. And it's also the fun, um, part of play. So, um, so yeah, like the nice thing about the, the what the choices that we made with the symbolic, um, toys was that they were, um, really just everyday objects grounded in reality that children could then, um, run with. Uh, um, and then I guess the other, some of the other objects was, um, things like blocks that could be turned into anything. Like your daughter with a stick, she can turn that stick into a magic wand, she can turn it into, um, she can use it for any other things. She can stir the soup with it or whatever. Um, so yeah. And then the, the toys that were functional really had a adult defined, um, um, function and, um, and hence their, hence their term functional play toys. And, um, that meant that the boundaries of what was possible with them were narrower, right? And so that, I guess if there's a guiding principle for, um, for like toy selection, it might be, okay, how many things can you do with this? And this underlies the, the, the fact that pretense and fantasy play or pretend plays symbolic play is, um, is naturally creative, right? And out of that creativity emerges, this is what we think happens out of that creativity emerges all of these interesting interactive behaviors, which just so happen to be important for kids' language, uh, yeah. But also fun. Yes, that's it. And there's a real move in schools I know in the uk, um, in particular where people are using more open-ended, especially natural resources. So for example, they've taken things I call a plastic food at the home corner and put things like pine cones and sticks and, and conquers and stuff in. And so yeah, there's a real move towards using things like you said, that having that question of what can I do with this? Mm-hmm. Are there lots of possible ways that I can use this? So yeah. And I think that's a really interesting way to think about it. So, yeah. Um, uh, in terms of, uh, what happens as children grow older, um, I dunno if you've kind of followed through any of this research in terms of symbolic play and what they're doing in the early years and kind of how that leads into adulthood. Like I know at Tell took, we find that often as children grow older, there's kind of less confidence to go with the flow in terms of symbolic play. Like if you ask a child in kind of like, nursery reception, what's, you know, this and they're like, it could be a rocket ship or it could be a man named Bob. Whereas if you ask a child in sort of like year six who's like a little bit older, they're more often gonna say it's a pen. Um, but I don't know, do you notice differences in terms of children as they grow older and symbolic play? Yeah, I mean it's, um, it, it definitely gets socialized out, right? And I, I think it's a really good question and something that we as scientists, we kind of just take for granted. But I don't know if anyone's really ever thought very hard and long about and studied why this happens. Yeah. And I think if you think about it on a society level, we probably do socialize children out of it because as they get older, they're introduced to more, um, scholastic type concepts at, at school, they start to do a lot of games with rules in like, so, so these might be sport or they might be other types of games that they're playing as well, which have really defined, um, defined, uh, boundaries again, um, because they've got rules. So, so yeah. And those are enjoyable for sure, but they don't, they often lack this symbolic or this fantasy element. I think where they do though consume fantasy elements is in, um, media, right? So, and, and in and in, um, literature as well. So we never, I always think we never lose this, um, propensity to, uh, delight in, in fantasy and pretense, but we channel it differently. And that's where I, I, that's what I think happens, but I think also it doesn't mean that it, it, I don't know if that's necessarily a good thing as well, that we don't have first person experience of it anymore. Right? So sometimes I think things like some analogies are things like drama, right? So if you, if there act in a play at school or something like that, but then still there's defined boundaries to that too. Yeah. So, um, so, so yeah, I, I think there's probably a really good, um, uh, there's probably a like a lot of, um, uh, I guess leverage there for people to even engage in like play-based therapy for adults and stuff, right? Um, yeah. That I, maybe that's how I'll make my millions, Maybe It's true. And it's really interesting sometimes to see practitioners when they're playing with children and you can see that the practitioners are really getting into it and they've kind of got their own ideas that they wanna bring along, and they still wanna do that whole thing of standing back and letting the child take the lead, but they're like, but I really wanna do it myself. I really want to kind of get in here. So yeah, I think, I think there's a lot of place for adults to still play and be playful in that way, which is, as a teacher and a practitioner, you, you have that bonus of getting to do that, so mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's it. I get to play now with my toddler, so that's, that's fun for me. So, yeah. Yeah. And There is stuff in that like, um, like there's research on how, um, parents sort of remember their childhood via their playing with their, and it is amazing when you are interacting with, with, um, young kids how a lot of these memories that somewhere deep in the recesses of your brain come up about games you would play or, or, um, things that you can, um, do and all that kind of stuff. So yeah, it's, um, it's, it's, it, it's going back to the idea of it being a uniquely human attribute. I think it's something that is really essentially human if we all do it and, and we get stuff out of it even as, even as adults. Yeah. I think so. I think so. Um, just seeing if there's any other questions I wanna kind of ask here. Um, but I think I've, I think I've covered a lot of stuff. Is there anything you'd want to chat about in addition to that, or anything you'd like to add? No, I don't think so. Yeah, I think this has been, this has been brilliant, Evan. I think it's such a good link with like what we're doing around the symbolic play and the storytelling, and I think it's just a really good message to get out to teachers around giving children that opportunity for lots more symbolic play and play in general. So, Yeah, I think so I, I, I remember being, um, when I, many years ago when I lived in the UK and I was, um, a junior researcher and I would go into like reception classes and I'd be testing the kids and stuff, and you would, I was not, uh, it was sort of interesting to see that, um, even sort of three and a half year olds would, would, they would start with things like phonics and they were learning and stuff like that. And I was really quite shocked. I thought, wow, three and a half. And, and it wasn't all that. But I think there is a tendency for us to privilege formal learning over, over these what often called think thought of as quite frivolous concepts that I, I don't think they're actually frivolous. And that's part of the reason why we do the research is because we repeatedly found this, these, um, these associations and these, uh, and dug deeper in them to find the reasons why. And we think that it's, like I said, it's something that's very core to humans and very core to, um, want to learn and enjoy what you're learning. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. That's it. And I think also, I think that, that it's something that's very hard for schools to measure, and there's a real pressure on schools to show impact and to show the difference that they're making. And I think that although we know this is super important stuff, and actually without the play that comes underneath, then you're never really gonna get those literacy levels that you need or the, the, you know, the exam results later on. Like, you need this in, in core, like right at the roots of stuff. But I think that often they want to show that impact or that change in a very small amount of time, and that's very difficult to do, which is why your research is super important, because it's showing that that actually it is something that you can measure. And it is a making a big difference. So, so yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a real shame that we think we have to measure mm-hmm. Young children. Yeah, It really is. It really is, isn't it? Yeah. It really is Those things. Uh, I think it's, yeah, it's, it's, um, anyway, Yeah. Have you on that? No. Have you gotten any advice for sort of practitioners that are in schools that, that are passionate about this, but find they might have that top down pressure coming from head teachers or people up above? Like what advice might you have? Yeah, there's some really good, um, there's a really good monograph. Like it's a short, I think it's like 90 pages or something. It's by, um, there's two researchers in the United States who've written a lot about this thing. They're called Kathy Hirsh Pasek. Mm-hmm. And Roberta Lenko. Yeah. And they wrote a, a great monograph that I think I've published in 2009. I can't at the moment remember what it, um, what it is, but it, uh, what it's called. But it was about this and about sort of the fact that, um, many schools in the United States are really trying to increase formal learning, and they're doing things like not giving the children recess and things like that. Um, and they wrote this great, um, monograph about how it's the wrong, it's wrongheaded to do that and how all of these, um, benefits children will learn and they'll learn well if they're able to, um, have the space to, to play. So I, yeah, I mean that's super accessible. So I'd start some something like there and, um, and, uh, yeah, and that's probably would arm anyone with all of the, all of the information they needed to go back to their head teacher and say, maybe, maybe rethink, uh, um, some of the things that we are doing. Mm-hmm. Yeah. That sounds good. That's brilliant. No, it's been really, it's been massive, a pleasure to speak to you, Evan, like mm-hmm. Yeah, I think it's been, it's been great. Like some really, really good information in there that's gonna be massively helpful for people. So, yeah. Yeah. Great. I'm glad we finally got to do it. I'm glad we finally got to do it. We've been planning this for a long time, haven't we? So yeah, that's it all the way from Australia, but you've been in the UK when we first started talking, so Yeah. Yeah. That's it. But no, it's been a, been a big pleasure talking to you and thank you for spending time with us.