Elaborated role play (i.e., pretending in which children imagine and act out the part of another individual on a regular basis) is often considered an early indicator of creativity, but there is not strong research evidence of a relation between this type of pretend play and performance on creativity tasks during the preschool years. One possible reason is that the measures of creativity that are commonly used are not appropriate for young children. To address this, we developed 2 new measures of creativity based on a storytelling task, in which children were asked to complete a story, and a drawing task, in which children were asked to draw an imaginary person. Of the 75 4-and 5-year-old children who participated, those who engaged in elaborated role play had higher creativity scores on both measures (controlling for age and language ability). In contrast, children's performance on a measure of pretend play development that did not involve imaginary others (i.e., the action pantomime task) was not related to either measure of creativity. These results suggest that the storytelling and drawing measures were effective in assessing children's creativity, and that they were specifically associated with elaborated role play, rather than the developmental level of children's ability to pretend.

This is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as

No abstract

No abstract