Peer Interactions in Preschool Inclusive Classrooms: The Roles of Pragmatic Language and Self-Regulation

Abstract

Drawing from a social network perspective, we examined the extent to which children with and without disabilities play with each other in preschool inclusive classrooms and identified malleable child characteristics that would support children forming these cross-status play interactions. A total of 200 children with disabilities and 301 children without disabilities participated in this study ( Mage = 52.39 months, SDage = 6.13). Results showed that children with and without disabilities did not differ in the extent to which they formed cross-status play interactions after pragmatic language and self-regulation were taken into account. However, typically developing children were more likely to form same-status play interactions than children with disabilities. Children’s cross-status play interactions were predicted by self-regulation ability, which was fully mediated by their pragmatic language. The impact of pragmatic language on the formation of cross-status play interaction was greater for children with disabilities than their typically developing peers.

Supporting Peer Interactions in the Inclusive Preschool Classroom Using Visual Scene Displays

“…Inclusive preschool classrooms have become increasingly common in recent decades, offering new opportunities for children with and without disabilities to experience positive social interactions and form friendships (Lin et al, 2019). Social interactions between children with disabilities and their peers can benefit children regardless of their disability status.…”

Language skills and friendships in kindergarten classrooms: A social network analysis.

“…This converges with previous studies that report a similar pattern for preschool children with developmental language disorder (Chen et al, 2018). This work has implications for advancing what we know about peer interactions of children with and without disabilities because the pragmatic language may be an important link between children’s play interactions and self-regulation (Lin et al, 2019). It is plausible that other domains of language may also be facilitative of peer interactions and associated with levels of centrality in classroom networks.…”

Triple Alignment: Congruency of Perceived Preschool Classroom Social Networks Among Teachers, Children, and Researchers

“…Comparatively, children, who are insiders of the networks, may perceive their peer interactions beyond the observable cues (e.g., level of trust), which can make their perceptions qualitatively different from the other informants (Pearl et al, 2007;Neal et al, 2011). Another methodological explanation is that the child-report network contains information about the directionality of peer interactions (e.g., who likes to play with a child the most), whereas both the teacher-and the researcher-report networks represented peer interactions between pairs of children without specifying the directionality (i.e., who initiated the interactions) based on the assessment approaches applied in the field (e.g., Martin and Fabes, 2001;Schaefer et al, 2010;Chen et al, 2018;Lin et al, 2019). Unsurprisingly, the level of congruency among child-, teacher-, and researcher-report networks generally decreased as certain binary network transformation approach was applied.…”