Changing the game: exploring infants' participation in early play routines

Abstract

Play has proved to have a central role in children's development, most notably in rule learning (Piaget, 1965; Sutton-Smith, 1979) and negotiation of roles and goals (Garvey, 1974; Bruner et al., 1976). Yet very little research has been done on early play. The present study focuses on early social games, i.e., vocal-kinetic play routines that mothers use to interact with infants from very early on. We explored 3-month-old infants and their mothers performing a routine game first in the usual way, then in two violated conditions: without gestures and without sound. The aim of the study is to investigate infants' participation and expectations in the game and whether this participation is affected by changes in the multimodal format of the game. Infants' facial expressions, gaze, and body movements were coded to measure levels of engagement and affective state across the three conditions. Results showed a significant decrease in Limbs Movements and expressions of Positive Affect, an increase in Gaze Away and in Stunned Expression when the game structure was violated. These results indicate that the violated game conditions were experienced as less engaging, either because of an unexpected break in the established joint routine, or simply because they were weaker versions of the same game. Overall, our results suggest that structured, multimodal play routines may constitute interactional contexts that only work as integrated units of auditory and motor resources, representing early communicative contexts which prepare the ground for later, more complex multimodal interactions, such as verbal exchanges.

Social deontics: A nano‐level approach to human power play

“…2 Normativity thus emerges as a practical skill that is based on participatory engagement, but its development is a gradual and extended process that continues into adolescence (Brinck, 2014(Brinck, , 2015. Structured, multimodal routines in infant-caregiver interaction provide the starting point for this development (Fantasia, Fasulo, Costall, & López, 2014; Rączaszek-Leonardi, Nomikou, & Rohlfing, 2013;Reddy, Liebal, Hicks, Jonnalagadda, & Chintalapuri, 2013). Over time, some of these early routines develop into more conventionalized ones (Bruner, 1985).…”

Do Infants Recognize Engagement in Social Interactions? The Case of Face‐to‐Face Conversation

“…Participating in collaborative activities very early in development seems to require a complex understanding of others' engagement; that is, their motivation to attend and stay involved in those activities. In fact, infants as young as 2 months of age show the ability to coordinate their behaviors with those of their caregivers (Fantasia, Fasulo, Costall, & López, ; Reddy, Markova, & Wallot, ; Tronick, Als, Adamson, Wise, & Brazelton, ). However, the development in infancy of the cognitive mechanisms involved in understanding others' conversations and attitudes, and inferring speakers' engagement from them, is still not completely understood (Tomasello, Carpenter, Call, Behne, & Moll, ).…”

Find the Hidden Object. Understanding Play in Psychological Assessments

“…Observations of children in the first year of life show that caregivers and children participate in play routines - such as nursery rhymes, interactive songs and the like–that engage simultaneously multiple senses and modalities (for example associating singing with touching and moving the body) and have recognizable trajectories (Fantasia et al, 2014); at the same time, many functional activities, such as feeding (Costantini, 2015) or nappy changing (Nomikou et al, 2016) are suffused with play and present similar characteristics of regularity and multimodality.…”