Some Properties of Social Play.

The extensive literature on children's play, although arising from a number of diverse theoretical orientations, reflects a major concern with the functions of play in the child's individual cognitive, physical, or psychosocial development. Empirical studies which have dealt with play as social behavior have examined the role of age, sex, and ethnic identity in determining choice of play activities or partner or have treated settings as independent variables affecting physical or psy chological features of play (Herron & Sutton-Smith, 1971). However, even those studies that have examined play in a social context have failed to ask how the interaction is carried out or what kinds of skills are involved in play interchanges. It is the purpose of this paper to describe the structure of spontaneous episodes of dyadic play and to suggest some of the basic competencies which underlie social play activity. It is useful to distinguish four possible states which may obtain when two children are alone together: social nonplay, e.g., both may collaborate to repair a broken toy,· nonsocial nonplay, e.g., one or both may independently explore an object; nonsocial play, e.g., one or both may engage in an independent imaginative activity, as when one child irons the laundry and the other builds a wall with blocks,· and social play, e.g., both are mutually engaged in a housekeeping activity such as cooking and eating dinner or are driving the toy car to a family vacation. This paper will examine some properties of the state of social play, analyzing first the structures underlying the rhythmic, repetitive behaviors which we will call ritual play and then tracing the same structures in less stylized play episodes. Social play is defined here as a state of engagement in which the successive, nonliteral behaviors of one partner are contingent on the nonliteral behaviors of the other partner. Viewed from the standpoint