Abstract

Research relating children’s social pretend play to the development of socio-cognitive competencies has been inconsistent (Lillard et al., 2013). In the current study we explore whether such inconsistency in past results could be in part due to the way pretence has been operationalized in terms of its quantity or quality. 183 children (Mage = 5.13 years; SD = 0.39) were observed while playing in pairs. Quantity of pretence was measured through frequency of children engagement in negotiating pretence explicitly, implicitly, or simply enacting pretence (exhaustive coding of mutually exclusive categories; Kappa = 0.74). Quality of pretence was measured by qualifying the sophistication of children’s pretence (a range from isolated transformations to coherent pretend stories, Krippendorff alpha = 0.84). Preliminary analysis show that neither overall quantity nor quality of pretence predicted children’s theory of mind (as measured by false belief) or teacher-reported social skills (SS) after controlling for age, gender and language ability. Post-hoc analyses, however, showed that the quantity of the individual types of pretence behaviours rather than overall pretence quantity were better predictors of socio-cognitive competencies. Specifically, greater frequency of pretence enactment was found to be negatively associated to children’s theory of mind, and positively associated with SS. Additionally, frequency of implicit pretence negotiation (a.k.a implicit metacommunication) was positively associated to SS. Results suggest the importance of children engagement in specific types of pretend play practices for the development of socio-cognitive competencies.