Preliminary Issues
Toys and their meanings in play‚ and sometimes in earnest‚ can be seen as aspects of communication and the transmission of culture (Goldstein 2011). Steve Kline retraces his intellectual journey through children’s culture and toys, indicating the ways in which they can be regarded as ‘media.’ Reflecting on 30 years as a media researcher, Kline traces the marketing of toys and games in order to re-situate debates about children’s toy play within the context of a global market culture. Kline interrogates the conflicting value discourses surrounding creativity and imagination in the age of ‘digital play media.’
Gilles Brougère asks whether toys are educational. What relationship can there be between an object and the act of learning? These questions often surround the discourse regarding toys and are caught in a tension that shows why such questions are poorly formulated, even meaningless. Indeed, the contradictory answers to these questions reflect two ideas (which can sometimes happily meld together): all toys are educational; certain toys are educational.
A toy is mainly an object addressed to children. It must persuade children or their caregivers. To analyze this kind of communication, we can use the notion of rhetoric—that is, what the toy means to its recipient, and how the object captures the consumer and/or the user, a child or adult on behalf of the child. The main way today is to make the object fun, mainly in relationship to children’s mass culture; that is, a rhetoric of fun. Another way is to connect children with education or development. Toys for children are seen as educational tools for children. But if a rhetoric of education has become less central and important for the toys, it still perpetuates this mainly for younger children who are more dependent on the adult’s choice. Brougère argues that the rhetoric of education is more a discourse, an image, than a reality.
David Myers (this volume) considers the ways in which toys and games occupy different spaces. Over the past quarter-century, digital media have had a large impact on toys and toy production. The USA National Toy Hall of Fame, for instance, now includes the Atari 2600 and Nintendo Game Boy alongside alphabet blocks and jacks as ‘classic icons of play’ (http://www.toyhalloffame.org/). Myers considers the ways in which toys and games are dissimilar. Early successful digital adaptations of popular toys (recasting the teddy bear as Teddy Ruxpin, for example) have yet to supplant their non-digital predecessors as overwhelmingly as World of Warcraft (2004) and similar Massive Multiplayer Online games have supplanted Dungeons and Dragons (1977).
There are several dimensions without need of reference to digital media along which toys and games might be distinguished. These include toys being associated with younger players (relative to game players), the physicality of the toy (relative to a digital game), and the rule-dependent nature of the game (relative to the toy). Myers suggests that these and related distinctions are rooted in the unique semiotic properties of the toy and the game. In most circumstances, in fact, digital media impose a fundamental dissonance during toy play: a context of control.
Language Development
Amanda Gummer (this volume) examines the roles of toys in the development of children’s language and communication. To offer a concrete example, consider playing with blocks. Playing with blocks promotes language development, spatial skills, and basic mathematics concepts. These conclusions are based on studies of children from 1½ to 6 years of age by Christakis , Zimmerman and Garrison (2007).
There are two main types of play with blocks. In free play, which is unstructured block play, children use blocks to build designs of their choice. In structured block play children attempt to make a particular structure from a model or plan. These two types of play involve different processes: the former relies on children’s imagination and ability to produce complex relations without prompting, while the latter calls upon the ability to analyze a spatial representation to create a predefined model. Free play with blocks and construction toys requires imagination, creativity, and planning. The basic form of building blocks allows constructions to be as complex as the imagination of the child using them. Structured block play, such as copying a model, requires careful observation, counting, and spatial relations. Both types of block and construction play contribute to early mathematics skills and language development.
In one study, children who played with plastic building bricks had significantly better language skills six months later, compared to a control group. In the study (Christakis et al. 2007) , sets of molded plastic building bricks were distributed to a random group of families with children aged 1½–2½ years who were registered at a pediatrics clinic. The parents also received newsletters with ‘blocktivities’ suggesting things that they and their child could do with the blocks (sort blocks by color, see how big a stack they could make, etc.). Data were gathered from 140 families. Most of the children who received blocks reported playing with them. Six months later, middle-and low-income children who received blocks had significantly higher language scores. The researchers conclude that playing with blocks can lead to improved language development in children from middle-and low-income families.
Why does block play promote language? As children manipulate objects, they begin to understand more about their qualities and relations. Older children begin to make up stories or scripts for these objects, which underlie further understanding of them. One theory that may explain associations between early exposure and subsequent cognitive and linguistic outcomes is based on the development of mental schemas that Vygotsky referred to as ‘scaffolding.’ (See Gummer, this volume.) Mental schemes are internal models of the world that a child uses to understand and master his or her environment. They are the precursors of thought and language. ‘Through play, that is, unstructured manipulation of objects, the child begins to develop a mental picture of and cognitive categories about the objects around him or her. These mental schemes underlie an understanding of object permanence, the development of memory, and the roots of impulse control and language’ (Christakis et al. 2007). An important leap in understanding occurs when the child learns to substitute and combine mental categories internally. For example, a bath sponge used as a boat.
Tina Bruce (2008) describes a study in which childcare providers were offered blocks and training in their use. The aim was to explore how block play can support sustained learning and development for children aged 2 to 5. Two groups were involved in the project. 48 pre-schools and day nurseries were offered in-depth training. They received a school set of Community Playthings unit blocks and a camera to record their projects. The 48 child-minders received a one-day training course in the use of these objects. Practitioners found that, through block play, children became better able to regulate disagreements, boys and girls were more likely to play together, and children developed an awareness of risk and how to manage it. The blocks supported a richer diversity of play, holding children’s interest over longer periods of time. Because block play transcends differences in age or background, older and younger children work cooperatively. Even if children do not speak the same language, they understand each other as they create with blocks. They develop ideas together. Children converse as they play, suggesting how play assists communication.
According to Whitebread and Basilio (2014), there are three characteristics of toys that promote early development: (1) Contingency: something clearly changes as a result of the child’s actions; (2) Cognitive challenge: there is a clear goal but it is challenging to achieve; (3) Scaffolding and control: adults can adjust the level of difficulty of the goal while the child maintains control of the actions.
Different toys elicit different speech. Children’s play and language tend to follow the themes suggested by their toys (Vukelich et al. 2013) . Functionally explicit or realistic toys, such as a doctor’s kit or a truck, stimulate related play themes and language. Toys offering a fantasy theme, such as dolls or dinosaurs, evoke fantastic play and decontextualized language (Pellegrini and Jones 1994) . For example, children use more varied functions of language when playing with housekeeping toys, such as pots, pans, stoves, and refrigerators, than when playing with art materials, such as paper, pencils/crayons, scissors, glue, and water/sand tables.
Toys also serve as prompts that stimulate parent-infant communication, which is crucial to language development (Roseberry et al. 2014) . Experiences with spatial toys such as blocks, puzzles, and shape sorters, and the spatial words and gestures they evoke from adults, have a significant influence on the early development of spatial skills, which are important for success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) (Verdine et al. 2014) .
Amanda Gummer describes the chronological development of communication in play and refers to specific toys and activities that were observed to facilitate the process. She compares the differences in the use of toys as communication tools by children aged 4–6 years with those aged 10–11 years. Observations are made of children’s use of toys to communicate with both peers and adults, and the different types of toys chosen by the children for a range of communications (e.g. intentional and non-intentional). The emergence of a sense of identity is believed to be the critical developmental factor to explain the differences observed between the two age groups. Gummer further considers other factors such as gender differences, ethnic origin, and socioeconomic factors.
By using toys with forms and aesthetics that are strongly influenced by typographic communication, there is potential for hybrid symbols to influence visual recognition of letters for literacy and language during toddler and preschool years. The type-as-toy concept of Maggio, Phillips and Madix has potential in a wide range of toys bound by the same design methodology—the first being a hanging mobile selected for its inherent benefits in early cognitive development. Combined with caregiver interaction and joint attention, Maggio et al. investigated whether children in preschool can identify typographic symbols arranged into zoomorphic compositions in the context of a toy.
Music and Cognition
Toys that enable listening to, or playing, music involve multiple senses and multiple regions of the brain. Music is processed by different areas of the brain working closely together to make sense of things such as melody, harmony, and rhythm. The ability to recognize patterns is necessary to appreciate music; it is also a key component of intelligence. So we should expect a relationship between musical comprehension and some forms of intelligence, including spatial reasoning, memory, language, math comprehension, and creativity (Weinberger 1998) .
‘Brain plasticity’ is the term for the capacity of the human brain to alter in response to the environment. Hearing music affects brain plasticity and the way a child’s brain develops. Exposure to music prenatally appears to help postnatal coordination and physical skills. In one study, babies in utero were exposed to recordings of different musical components that increased in complexity during the pregnancy. In total, each baby was exposed to between 50 and 90 h of music. The babies exposed to music seemed to make faster progress in some areas compared to babies who had not been exposed to music. Their pre-speech became evident sooner, and there were noticeable differences in hand-eye coordination, visual tracking, facial mirroring, general motor coordination, and the ability to hold a bottle with both hands (Lafuente et al. 1997) .
Children from preschoolers through adolescents who receive from six months to two years of piano lessons show improved cognitive skills, spatial skills, and vocabulary compared to control groups that did not receive music lessons (Piro and Or...