Shape, Action, Symbolic Play, and Words: Overlapping Loops of Cause and Consequence in Developmental Process

Abstract

AbstractHuman beings are remarkably inventive, possessing the ability to solve problems and to create novel things. This chapter focuses on an early form of inventiveness that has long intrigued developmentalists—what is sometimes called symbolic play, but more narrowly, is also known as “object substitution in play.” The specific phenomenon consists of young children using some object, not for what it is, but as a “stand in” for something else in play—a banana as a phone, a box as a doll bed, a shoe as a toy car. The chapter considers how and why these object substitutions may be linked to language.