Effects of Infant-Parent Play With a Technology-Enhanced Toy: Affordance-Related Actions and Communicative Interactions
Authors:
- 28 December 2009
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Research in Childhood Education
- Vol. 24 (1) , 1-17
Abstract
Infant-parent play with toys is an early form of social communication, and the toy features (i.e., affordances), as well as the child's language competence, contribute to the developmental level of the play and the types of play actions that occur. This research, conducted in cooperation with a toy manufacturer, investigated how the affordances of a technology-enhanced toy were used by 26 infant-parent pairs during six clinical sessions of play with the toy. The types of play, the features of the toy that elicited play, the humor elicited by the toy, and the communicative interactions of the parent and child were observed. Results indicated that certain affordances of the toy were used in exploration, practice play, and social games and were related to episodes of child laughter. The communicative interactions of the parents and the language patterns used in the sessions grew in complexity as the children's language facility increased. The affordances of the toy played a role in a variety of parent-child interactions and joint attention experiences.Keywords
This publication has 37 references indexed in Scilit:
- Driven from distraction: How infants respond to parents’ attempts to elicit and re-direct their attentionInfant Behavior and Development, 2008
- Technology in the Classroom: Learning in the Robotic World: Active or Reactive?Childhood Education, 2001
- Technological Affordance, Social Practice and Learning Narratives in an Early Childhood SettingInternational Journal of Technology and Design Education, 2000
- Infant-like Social Interactions between a Robot and a Human CaregiverAdaptive Behavior, 2000
- Development of the sense of humor1998
- The words children learn: Evidence against a noun bias in early vocabulariesCognitive Development, 1993
- Lexical development during middle infancy: A mutually driven infant-caregiver process.Developmental Psychology, 1992
- Mother-Child Conversation in Different Social Classes and Communicative SettingsChild Development, 1991
- Maternal Recasts and Other Contingent Replies to Language-Impaired ChildrenJournal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, 1990
- The ontogenesis of speech actsJournal of Child Language, 1975