Abstract

GARCIA CERNAZ, Santiago; MARTINEZ, Isabel C.  and  ESPANOL, Silvia. Musicality and play in early childhood: the scaffolding that forms of vitality play provides to pretend play. Interdisciplinaria [online]. 2022, vol.39, n.3, pp.15-33.  Epub July 18, 2022. ISSN 1668-7027.  http://dx.doi.org/10.16888/interd.2022.39.3.1.

The pretend play, one that involves the creation of an imaginary situation, has been a privileged object of study in developmental psychology framed in the linguistic turn. Its important role in the development of complex psychological functions, such as language, theory of mind or narrative capacity, has been pointed out. In recent years, there has been a change in focus in the human sciences that has been dubbed the corporal turn: a re-focus on the analysis and conceptualization of bodily aspects that are at the base of various cognitive capacities. Thanks to the use of analysis tools typical of the temporal arts –such as music and dance– to the field of cognitive psychology, a new form of play has been documented in early childhood: the forms of vitality play. It recovers the idea of forms of vitality from Stern (2010), which refers to affects that cannot be reflected in the lexicon of Darwinian emotions. The forms of vitality are a Gestalt, an emergent property where movement, time, force, space and directionality/intentionality are integrated; they are a fundamental property of multimodal exchanges in the adult-baby dyad as well as of the experience, as spectator or performer, of non-figurative temporal arts such as dance and music. The forms of vitality play arise as a reconceptualization of the notion of musical play and is considered a reissue of early social play with a symmetrical participation of the child in the composition of play. It is defined as any pleasant or self-remunerative activity, in which motifs of movements and/or sounds are elaborated according to the repetition-variation form, at the expense of any figurative content. The forms of vitality play have been observed in the third year of the child’s life and it has been pointed out that it can manifest in a simple way or in combination with the pretend play. Likewise, it was suggested that when the pretend play is presented in combination with the forms of vitality play, the latter could be scaffolding the pretend play, although how this happens has not been clearly specified.

The objective of the present study is to carry out a microanalysis of the sounds and movements of a pretend play scene combined with forms of vitality play of a girl of 1 year and 11 months of age and an adult, in order to know how such scaffolding is produced. The sound envelope was analyzed in order to identify and describe the timing of the sounds. Regarding movement, specialized software was used to graph its trajectory and for the analysis of the expression of movements, the basic categories “Shape and Effort” of the Laban-Bartenieff system of movement analysis were used (Laban, 1971). The results indicate the presence of interactive synchrony based on an underlying pulse that sustains mutuality between the players and provides a temporal structure on which the synchrony of the self can be anchored. Furthermore, it allows the sharing of continuity and contrast in the quality of sounds and movements and thus provides the dyad with a primary level of understanding with non-mediated meanings; promotes the exploration of the play space and the expansion of the potential of the fictional scene; it favors the maintenance of joint attention and mutual understanding through ontogenetically pre-fiction semiotic mechanisms, which favor the interactive fluidity of play.

Keywords : pretend play; forms of vitality play; early childhood; interactional synchrony; microanalysis.

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