Resultados de la prueba de salida en niños de segundo grado

INTRODUCTION

Previous researchers have demonstrated a relationship between normal children’s abilities in spontaneous pretend play and their wider capacities for relating to others. For instance, Rubin and Maioni (1975) reported a significant association between the incidence of dramatic play and children’s popularity among their peers. Coimolly and Doyle (1984) correspondingly showed that children able in what they called ‘social fantasy play’ were also more generally socially competent and popular with their peers, with greater capacities to empathise and comprehend the roles of others in social situations.

This chapter similarly presents a consideration of congenitally blind children’s pretend play abilities in relation to their social relating. Its intent went further, though, to provide a detailed examination of the play itself, for what it might say about the children’s qualities of understanding of themselves and other people. The chapter will provide the theoretical and empirical background and experimental methodology necessary to allow further exploration and evaluation of the project hypothesis, that those blind children who show impairments in their interpersonal relations will consequently have problems in their social understanding that other persons are sentient beings, acting according to their individual mental processes, as illustrated here through their ability to represent objects, and other people as characters, in symbolic play.

In the earlier observations of blind children's play abilities (Chapter Three), note was taken if the child showed any evidence of play involving a pretend attitude. This might be done by the child implying the tangible presence of a non-present object or situation, or by treating one present object as if it were another - and then physically acting according to the chosen state of things. In either case there was a definite decision by the playing child to assert his or her preferred version of reality. Indeed such an alternative state of worldly affairs could be established and maintained purely by verbal invocation of the objects or situation, through a solely narrative symbolic sequence. Any indication was also recorded of the child at any time representing him or herself, another playmate, or

indeed a completely separate character, during the play, i.e. playing a role. As above, this could have involved a toy, other object, or play-mate to stand for the person in question, or may just have been in the form of a verbal reference.

In sighted children, such symbolic play is seen to emerge during late infancy and early childhood. It involves an attitude of 'suspending reality' while dealing with or talking about objects and other people; that things in one's experience do not necessarily have to be taken always as they are literally found. One can therefore envisage a conceptual difference between, on the one hand, objects themselves as they are, and their particular meanings as given by people. Pretence lies in the manipulation of these meanings, such that, say, the pencil on this desk could be treated by me as a rocket (my pretend version of a rocket) if I were to decide to apply that particular meaning to it. Further, I could evoke the image of a rocket by purely verbal pretence, without needing an actual suggestive pencil.

Before concentrating on the abilities of blind children in this area, this chapter first presents more broad research and theorising regarding the development of symbolic play in childhood. Investigation into the development of the ability to symbolise in infants and young children has been largely on two levels. Research concerned with the developmental sequence of pretend play structure, by McCune- Nicholich (1981) for example, has concentrated on establishing the order of complexity in which children's play schemes progress. On another level, theoretical attempts to account for this developmental order, and to characterise the cognitive basis of symbolic ability per se, have exercised authors such as Leslie (1987), Hobson (1993) and Lillard (1993). This chapter considers both the structural development and conceptual basis of symbolic play. These formed the backgrotmd against which the respective abilities of blind and sighted children were examined by direct experimental comparison, in order to provide clues as to the respective states of understanding of blind and sighted children of the social concepts underpirming symbolic play. One particular element of this study was to remove any intervening effects that might occur through the influence of the child’s peer-group social circumstance. By constraining the child within a one-to-one play opportunity with a neutral

play partner, there would be more of a chance to sample the child’s actual symbolic play abilities, without having to consider the influence on their play of their relationships with classmates.

Briefly, the following predictions were generated by the hypotheses underpinning the whole project: (1) That the sub-group of blind children whose social engagement is relatively intact would demonstrate qualities of symbolic play (as illustrative of social understanding) akin to their sighted counterparts, of similar age and general cognitive ability.

(2) That the sub-group of children with problems in their interpersonal relatedness would also show relative impairments in symbolic play abilities, even when their level of ‘general’ cognitive competence is taken into account. Explicitly, if a group of socially impaired blind children were matched with a group of socially able blind children according to CA and verbal ability (and therefore IQ), the socially impaired children would show comparative difficulties in aspects of symbolic play.