Key takeaways:

- Evan Kidd’s Background: A developmental psychologist and linguist at the Australian National University in Canberra, Evan focuses on the relationship between symbolic (pretend) play and language acquisition, researching this link for over a decade.

- Defining Play: Play is hard to define but is characterized by being intrinsically motivated, non-literal, enjoyable, flexible, and focused on the process rather than the outcome, with a criteria-based approach used to capture its essence.

- Types of Play: Includes social contingency play (e.g., peekaboo, emerging in the first six months), sensory motor play (e.g., banging blocks), object play (e.g., Lego, clay), language play (e.g., babbling, crib talk), physical activity play (e.g., running, rough-and-tumble), and symbolic play (non-literal use of objects/actions/persons, emerging around 12 months).

- Symbolic Play and Language: Symbolic play, such as object substitution (e.g., using a banana as a phone) or sociodramatic play (e.g., tea parties), is strongly linked to language development, with a meta-analysis showing a robust correlation (r = 0.37) across childhood, indicating symbolic play fosters language skills.

- Mechanisms of Impact: Symbolic play creates a rich communicative context with increased joint attention, representational gestures, interactive language, and conversational turns, acting as a zone of proximal development where children, scaffolded by adults, operate at their highest linguistic level.

- Practical Implications: Symbolic play is critical for children with low language levels, especially post-Covid, as it provides a non-threatening environment for language development, with open-ended toys (e.g., sticks, blocks) fostering creativity and interaction over restrictive functional toys.

- Advice for Practitioners: Encourage symbolic play by using open-ended materials, acting as a play partner to scaffold interactions, and prioritizing conversational turns to elevate children as equal partners, while advocating for play-based curricula to counter top-down pressures for formal learning, supported by resources like Kathy Hirsh-Pasek and Roberta Golinkoff’s monograph.

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