The Relationship Between Children’s Scale Error Production and Play Patterns Including Pretend Play

Abstract

Children of about 2 years of age occasionally make scale errors, e.g., they may attempt to fit their body into extremely small objects. Although previous studies have suggested that immature cognitive abilities may be responsible for these errors, the mechanism of scale error production is unclear. Because we assumed that obtaining characteristics of scale error behavior in the context of play would give us more useful indications concerning individual differences in producing scale errors, we examined how children engage in scale error behavior in relation to other types of play behavior, such as pretending, during the scale error task. The results indicate that children who produced scale errors exhibited less pretend play with miniature toys and tended to refuse to play with miniature toys more often than those who did not produce any scale errors during the task. Moreover, among the children who produced scale errors, the children who produced more scale errors were less likely to touch the miniature objects and less likely to perform pretending actions than those who produced fewer scale errors. These results suggest that pretense play is deeply related to a lower production, or no production, of scale errors. Some immature cognitive abilities underlining pretense play can be assumed to be related to the production of scale error. In conclusion, this study is one of the first to demonstrate empirically significant relationships between children’s scale error production and pretend behaviors, although further studies are necessary to understand the mechanisms.

Large‐scale data decipher children's scale errors: A meta‐analytic approach using the zero‐inflated Poisson models

“…Hence, other interactions with the target objects might have been dropped from the raw data, leading to overestimating the proportion of scale error occurrences. 4 Total vocabulary size for children who participated in and Ishibashi and Uehara (2020) were presented at the conferences (Ishibashi & Uehara, 2017, primarily focusing on the relationships between their lexical development and pretending behavior. 5 The J-MCDI included 281 items for concrete nouns, 103 items for verbs, and 63 items for adjectives.…”

“…imenter's verbal instructions are not restricted during a scale error task in general, we included only the dataset of the noun condition in the present study Ishibashi and Uehara (2020). analyzed only the first 3 min of the whole 5 min observation period; however, to align the time of analysis with other studies, we recalculated the number of scale errors for all 5-min observation periods and used them in this study.For the classroom studies, observations were performed from observation booths adjacent to each classroom equipped with one-way mirrors and earphones.…”

Data from “Object Labeling Activates Young Children’s Scale Errors at an Early Stage of Verb Vocabulary Growth”

“…We used a slide, car, desk set (chair and table), cap, and shoes for the study. These objects comprised a childsized and miniature-sized version, except for the shoes following the procedure in previous studies (Ishibashi & Moriguchi, 2017;Ishibashi & Uehara, 2020). The sizes of the objects are shown in Table 1.…”

“…Although there is a previous study with a larger sample size n = 125, 18-30 months), our dataset has the equivalent number of participants uniformly distributed during the toddlerhood period to the many other studies on scale errors (e.g., Grzyb et al, 2014;Ishibashi & Uehara, 2020;Rivière et al, 2020). This dataset can be used to perform a power analysis to estimate the desired sample size for future inlab scale error studies.…”

Does Children’s Scale Error Relate to a Failure to Detect Size Change?

“…Two children were excluded because it was unclear when exactly the child entered the play room. Children's behaviors were classified by the previous study (Ishibashi & Uehara, 2020): (a) "touching" referring to usual play except for pretense and scale error behavior, such as putting the car on the chair or slide and touching, (b) "pretending" referring to pretend play such as pushing a car on the floor to run fast, (c) "scale error" as referring to the definition of DeLoache et al (2004).…”