Developmental trends in children's pretend play.

The developmental trends in pretend play were investigated in children 2-6 years of age (18 in each of five age groups) by examining changes in pretend action and speech separately. Play behaviour was assessed by using a selected set of Duplo Lego toys. Interest focused on occurrence of decentration, decontextualization and integration at different age levels. The proportions of decentred and decontextualized acts, action integrations and play themes, increased linearly with age. Changes in substitutive and inventive actions were, however, more minor than expected. Single-scheme combinations did not reveal any essential aspect of the development of children's symbolic competence. In this sense, multischeme combinations were more important in revealing the children's way of organizing toy material. Linear age trends were not found for language measures. The use of decentred utterances, language integrations and linguistically expressed themes were individual-specific rather than age-related. Issues for studying pretend play in language-impaired groups are also suggested.