Jerome bruner play thought language

Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (Taylor & Francis Group)

Play, Thought, and Language
Author(s): Jerome Bruner
Source: Peabody Journal of Education, Vol. 60, No. 3, The Legacy of Nicholas Hobbs: Research
on Education and Human Development in the Public Interest: Part 1 (Spring, 1983), pp. 60-69
Published by: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates (Taylor & Francis Group)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1492180
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JeromeBruner

I am thoroughly convinced that there is a very special place for a con-
stantly renewing dialogue between those who spend time asking ques-
tions about children and those who work more practically with them on a
day-to-day basis in playgroups, nurseries, and the like. I think that there
has been a remarkably rapid progress among biologists, psychologists,
and linguists in establishing findings about human growth in children
that is highly relevant to the way in which we conduct our education and
our play activities before that. We are living in a period in which many
practical and theoretical interests concerning childhood are converging.
It is a privilege to be a participant in that convergence. We have a special
opportunity, it seems to me, for exchanging our ideas back and forth
between research and practice.
My subject is the interrelationship of play, language, and thought. I
shall try to be brief about it. Not that there is a lack of research on the
subject to be reported, because a great deal has been accomplished. But
rather, I want to leave room at the end to talk about the practical implica-
tions of this subject: how to organize the play activity of children in
playgroups in order to help our children realize their potential and live
more richly.

Let me begin by setting forth in outline what I think to be the funda-
mental functions of play in activity of children:
Let me note first that to play implies a reduction in the seriousness
of the consequences of errors and of setbacks. In a profound way, play is
an activity that is without frustrating consequences for the child even

JEROME BRUNERis George Herbert Mead University Professor, New School for Social Research,
New York, New York. This article is based on an invited address presented to the Preschool
Playgroups Association of Great Britain at its annual general meeting in Llanduduo, Wales,
March 1983.

60


though it is a serious activity. It is, in a word, an activity that is for itself
and not for others. It is, in consequence, a superb medium for explora-
tion. Play provides a courage all its own.
Secondly, the activity of playing is characterized by a very loose
linkage between means and ends. It is not that children don't pursue
ends and employ means to get them in their play, but that they often
change their goals enroute to suit new means or change the means to suit
new goals. Nor is it that they do so only because they have run into
blocks, but out of the sheer jubilation of good spirits. It provides not only
a medium for exploration, but also for invention.
Closely related to the previous point, it is characteristic of play that
children are not excessively attached to results. They vary what they are
up to and allow their fantasies to make substitutions for them. If this
variation is not possible, the child very quickly becomes bored with his
activity. Watch an infant piling wood bricks and you will be struck by the
diversity and the combinatorial richness of how he plays. It is an unparal-
leled opportunity for ringing changes on the commonplace.
Thirdly, in spite of its richness, play is very rarely random or by
chance. On the contrary, it seems to follow something like a scenario.
Recall the famous example of Sully's little twin sisters, the one saying to
the other "Let's play twin sisters." And then they proceed to play a game
in which the general object is to share everything with absolute equality,
quite contrary to the way in which things go in ordinary life. Yet in some
interesting way, this scenario of total equality is a kind of idealized
imitation of life. Sometimes these scenarios are harder to discern than at
other times, but it is always worth looking carefully to see what in a
formal sense play is about. It is often, in Joyce's words, an epiphany of
the ordinary, an idealization, a pure dilemma.
Fourthly, it is said that play is a projection of interior life onto the
world in opposition to learning through which we interiorize the exter-
nal world and make it part of ourselves. In play we transform the world
according to our desires, while in learning we transform ourselves better
to conform to the structure of the world. This is an extremely important
activity for growth, and we will come back to it later. It gives a special
power to play that is heady and, sometimes, a little frightening.
Finally, and it can really go without saying, play gives pleasure-
great pleasure. Even the obstacles that we set up in play in order to
surmount them give us pleasure in doing so. Indeed, the obstacles seem
necessary, for without them the child quickly becomes bored. In this
sense, I think we would have to agree that play has about it something of
the quality of problem solving, but in a most joyous fashion. But let me
be clear. Unless we bear in mind that play is a source of pleasure, we are
really missing the point of what it's about.

61

PEABODY JOURNAL OF EDUCATION
The Legacyof NicholasHobbs

Let me now say a word about the uses to which play is put, though I
have just said that play is free and seemingly for itself. For it is the case
that (though it is self-prompted) we often use play to achieve other ends
we may have in mind. We do this necessarily but at our own peril.
Take first the way in which play is structured in order to instruct our
children, however subtlely, in the values of our culture. Take competition
and competitiveness as a case in point. We often encourage competition in
play, indeed use play to instruct our children how to compete well, and
from a very early age. Let us even grant that Waterloo was won on the
playing fields of Eton. But the children of the Tengu in New Guinea play
games in their society that do not terminate in one party winning, but
only when the two sides have achieved equality. This emphasis on equal-
ity, you will not be surprised to find out, is also very characteristic of the
adult society. Does this differential emphasis on the element of competi-
tion in play serve to make our society and Tengu society as different as
they are? No, that would be going a bit too far. But nevertheless, the way
the competitive element is handled in childhood play is a big factor in
predisposing children in particular societies to take the competitive
stance that they do as adults. There is no question that the games of
childhood reflect some of the ideals that exist in the adult society and that
play is a kind of socialization in preparation for taking your place in that
adult society. We would all agree that it is important to be conscious about
how much competitiveness we encourage in the play of children, lest we
create so much of it that something of the freedom of play is lost. It is one
thing to use play as an agent of socialization in some spontaneous way.
But exploiting it is somehow a different matter.
We also have it in the back of our minds, when we encourage various
kinds of play in childhood, that the activity will serve some therapeutic
function for the child. Perhaps that puts it too strongly, but it is better to
overstate it than to sweep it aside. Plainly, play with other children does
have an important therapeutic role or, in any case, an important role in
helping children to take their place more easily in the stressful social
activities of later life. We know from research on isolated monkeys raised
in the laboratory, that if they have twenty minutes of play with other
monkeys they will not (like total isolates) lose their capacity to interact
with other animals nor will they, like those others, show a decrement in
intelligence. Twenty minutes a day of free play is all that is needed to save
the sanity of these poor animals.
But to organize play mainly with the view toward fostering mental
health in children is also to risk losing something very important. Again
there is a danger of "taking the action away from the child." We may
thank God and evolution that it is difficult to exclusively take the action
away from children in order to organize their play in the interest of their

62


mental health. I do not think we know enough to play the role of great
engineers to the young in their or any other domain.
And then there is play as a means of improving the intellect. Yes, of
course, but ... we will come back to this matter, but the same strictures
about great engineering will be found to be true again. There is every-
thing to be said, indeed, for letting the child loose in a decent setting with
rich materials and some good cultural models to follow. I think I can even
give a practical argument for this view-that we can be quite relaxed
about not pushing children through play in order to squeeze some ap-
propriate behavior out of them. Let me tell you about an experiment.

It is an experiment I conducted with two colleagues, Kathy Silva and
Paul Genova. It can serve as a little moral for my point. We studied
children between the ages of three and five. They were given an interest-
ing little task to do. A child had to get a pretty little piece of colored chalk
out of a transparent box that was placed some distance out of reach of
them. The rule of the game was that they had to get the colored chalk
while they remained seated in their chair some distance off. They had all
sorts of things to use: some sticks, some clamps, some string. The solu-
tion to the problem consisted of making a longer stick by joining together
shorter sticks with the clamps or string. If a child didn't succeed right off
the bat in solving the problem, we would give him hints, and if that
didn't serve, we would then give further hints until he finally got to the
end. The first hints were something like "Are you thinking of some way
in which you can help yourself solve the problem?" And eventually we
would say things like "Have you thought about the possibility of clamp-
ing together two sticks?" Finally, all of the children solved the problem,
even if we had to guide them all the way home. I can tell you that it was
the sort of play that delights the children very much.
We divided the children into three groups.
The first group of children were given a period of play before facing
our task, and in the course of that play they had an opportunity to fool
around with the sticks, with the clamp and a string, however they might
desire. In a second group we gave each child a little pedagogical demon-
stration explaining how you could join together two strings with a clamp,
etc. And in the third group, we simply familiarized the children with the
kind of material they were going to be playing with and gave them some
simple demonstrations of what the material was like. By a little clever
manipulation we saw to it that all of the children had roughly the same
amount of exposure to the material as far as time is concerned, although,
obviously, the quality of the exposure differed according to which of the
three groups they were in.

63

The Legacy of Nicholas Hobbs

Now let me tell you what happened to the children in those three
different groups.
The children in that first group who had a chance to play with the
materials in advance solved the problem better than the children in the
other two groups. Let me call these children in the first group the "true
players." Not only did they solve the problem more often, but they
seemed to make better use of the suggestive hints we gave them than the
other children. Besides, the "true players" had far less tendency to aban-
don the task enroute when they ran into trouble. They were more frustra-
tion proof. They seemed altogether better at the way in which they went
about things, those "true players." They knew how to begin simply; they
had far less tendency to try out complicated hypotheses; and so forth.
Why did our "true players" do so well? To begin with, they seemed far
less frustrated in carrying out the task than did the other children. They
neither seemed to resent their failed efforts nor did they feel they were
losing face. That was what made it possible for them to begin simply, and
also what made it possible to accept hints and suggestions more readily
than the other children. The "true players" saw the task as an invitation
to play around with a problem. They did not have to cope with putting a
good face on their efforts or of dealing perpetually with self-esteem.
They could be free and inventive.
I know this experiment is too simple-minded. But for all that, it was a
little microcosm of life. Think of the hypothesis of the great Dutch histo-
rian Huizinga: that human culture emerged out of man's capacity to play,
to adopt the ludic attitude. Or of those great laboratories of physics at
Cambridge under Lord Rutherford or at Copenhagen under Niels
Bohr-places known for their good humor, practical jokes, and funny
stories. Perhaps our "true players," like those happy physicists, could
benefit from those huge benefits in spirit that play grants us.

Let us pass now from the little world of experiments with children or
with playful physicists in the great laboratories. Consider now how it is
that human beings accomplish the formidable task of learning how to
speak their mother tongue. For I think that we will also find here that
there is a considerable role for playfulness in the child's mastery of the
miracle of language. Do not be confused by the aspect of language that is
innate or inborn. But remember that there is a great deal of it that also has
to be mastered through try-out and experience. We have to learn all sorts
of subtle things like, for example, that when somebody says "Would you
be so kind as to pass the salt?" that they are not asking us about the limits
of our kindness, but are making a request for the salt in a fashion that
honors our voluntary role in complying. I have spent a great deal of time

64

Play, Thought,and Language

in these past ten years studying how children acquire the uses of their
language, and I want to give you a few of my conclusions as they bear on
the issues we have been discussing.
One of the first and most important conclusions is that the mother
tongue is most rapidly mastered when situated in playful activity. It is
often the case that the most complicated grammatical and pragmatic
forms of the language appear first in play activity. Take as an example
one of the first uses of the conditional in a child of three years who says to
another child: "If you give me your marbles I'll give you my revolver if
you're nice." It is a long time before such complicated language is used in
the more tense, practical situations of ordinary life. In general it has been
my experience that playful situations are the ones where one finds the
first complicated predicate structures, the first instances of ellipsis, of
anaphora, and so forth. There is something about play that encourages
combinatorial activity in general, including the intrinsic combinatorial
activity of grammar involved in producing more complex expressions in
a language. Aside from that, it matters deeply in a child's mastery of his
own language that there not be too many consequences that stem from
making errors. Confrontations with adults or older children who insist
that the younger child say something correctly will very frequently lead
to certain kinds of expressions going underground and not being tried
out for some while afterward.
There is one aspect of the early acquisition of language that is extraor-
dinarily important in nourishing language. It poses a dilemma. The
kind of talk by mothers that encourages children to enter into conversa-
tion is in what is technically called the B.T. register; that is to say, Baby
Talk, talk that is at the level of the child, talk that the child can already
understand. How can the child learn his language from talk that he can
already understand? That is the dilemma. The solution is simple. The
importance of Baby Talk is that the child gets an opportunity to try out
the different ways in which he can combine the elements of the language
that he already knows in order to make more complex utterances and in
order to get different things done with the language that he already has
in hand. The child is not simply learning language, but learning to use
language as an instrument of thought and action in a combinatorial fash-
ion. In order to be able to talk about the world in a combinatorial fashion
the infant seems to have to be able to play with the world in that flexible
fashion that the playful attitude promotes.
There are some celebrated studies by linguists like Ruth Weir and
Katherine Nelson that have recorded the "conversations" that young
children have after they've been put to bed all alone and the lights turned
out. These bedtime soliloquies provide pure little experiments, in which
the child is pushing language to the full limits of its combinability. In

65


Weir's observations, her son Anthony goes through sequences like
this: "Mommy hat," "Mommy blue hat," "Mommy hat blue, no, no,
no." Anthony was the classic instance of a spontaneous grammatical
apprentice. Or Katherine Nelson's Emmy, who would spend five min-
utes of talk pushing to the limits the meaning of her father's utterance
before bedtime, that only little babies cry, that she is a big girl, and big
girls don't cry. The number of changes that she rings on the theme are
monuments to her effort, half seriously and half playfully, to arrive at
some meaning of her father's imprecation.
So we are left with the interesting dilemma that it is not so much
instruction either in language or in thinking that permits the child to
develop his powerful combinatorial skills, but a decent opportunity to
play around with language and to play around with his thinking that
turns the trick.
Now I think we can turn to the practical question about whether and
how we can be, and whether we should be, engineers of play in our
playgroups and nursery schools. I want to use as my text a report we
published on the organization and conduct of playgroups and nursery
schools here in Britain during the closing years of the 1970s.
As you all very well know, there developed during the last generation a
curious ideology about the nature of play and how play should be con-
ducted in groups. This ideology was founded on the belief that various
activities were really play. Anything that had any structure to it, or that
in any way inhibited spontaneity was not really play. Moreover, real play
had to be free of all constraints from adults and be completely autonom-
ous of their influence. True play, in a word, came entirely from the inside
out. Its typical vehicles were fingerpaints, clay, water, sand, etc. I rather
suspect that the basis of this ideology of play was principally therapeu-
tic, in the sense that it was designed to take all pressure off the child,
although it had a touch too of the romanticism of Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Early in our inquiry in ordinary playgroup settings we started study-
ing what in fact really produced rich and elaborated play in children,
without any particular attachment to prevailing ideology. We went
about our observations with the high rigor that serious experiments
deserve, in order to find out something about what children really like to
do, what kinds of themes and materials they like to work with, and what
it is that produced richness and elaboration in their play. As some of you
will recall, we made thousands of observations using the most modern
techniques, and naturally and eventually, like the modern investigators
we were, we eventually committed our findings to a computer to which
we directed some very sharp questions. For example, we asked the com-
puter to figure out for us the kinds of activities and the kinds of cir-
cumstances that produced the longest episodes of play and the ones that

66

Play, Thought,and Language

had the biggest set of elaborations on a theme. It isn't that hard to find
such things out by hand, but when you have thousands of observations
to sort out, the computer helps. The results were more than a little in-
teresting.
The sequences of play that were the longest and the richest and the
most elaborated were produced by materials that had a structure that
could be called instrumental-that is to say, episodes that had means that
led to an end. Mostly, these were activities and materials that made it
possible for the child to construct something. They were constructions,
moreover, whose progress could be appreciated by the child without
instructions from or recourse to an adult. I have to tell you that water,
sand, clay, and fingerpaint were not up at the top of the list of materials
that produced this form of constructive and elaborative play. Such mate-
rials, though they have much worth, do not lead to the kind of com-
binatorial push of which we have been talking. In order to get that push
you need some sort of back and forth between means and ends.
A second answer our computer gave us about what produced pro-
longed concentration and rich elaboration in play rather took us aback. It
was the presence of an adult. I do not mean an adult "over the shoulder"
of the child, trying to direct his activity, but one in the neighborhood
who gave some assurance that the environment would be stable and
continuous, but would also give the child reassurance and information
as, if, and when the child needed it. Let the adult intervene brusquely
and steal the initiative from the child, and the child's play, or the chil-
dren's play would become duller. In some ways, I think, this sympathetic
presence of an adult or partner is similar to the role that an adult plays in
the development of language about which we have already talked.
I think you'll be glad to learn that the third secret our computer di-
vulged we already knew pretty well, although it is sometimes denied in
the official ideology of the last generation. It is that one is a wanderer, two
is company, and three is a crowd. More seriously, two children playing
together can exchange ideas, can negotiate their intentions, can elaborate
as needs be, and can go on for as long as necessary. One alone has
difficulty sustaining play activity. And three is indeed a distracting crowd
with nobody able to hold the floor long enough to carry the day. Watch
two little girls playing at a tea party under a blanket spread across the
backs of two chairs. They generate a domestic scenario of astonishing
subtlety and richness. Listen to them: "Would you like a cup of tea, my
dear?" And the other responds: "Oh, yes, but wait just a second, the
telephone is ringing." And the first continues after a pause: "I hope it was
a friend of yours." and the other: "No, it was the tailor calling back." And
on it goes for five minutes. It is perhaps more difficult to know why it is
that children operating on their own, solo, have such trouble in maintain-

67


ing concentration. I think it relates to a point that has been made by
virtually every student of child development in the last half century.
Thought and imagination frequently begin in the form of dialogue with a
partner, and without the support of another, it quickly collapses. At least
early on. The development of thought may be in large measure deter-
mined by the opportunity for dialogue, with dialogue then becoming
internal and capable of running off inside one's head on its own.
Let me tell you one last finding of our study on the sources of richness
in play. I must confess I was rather surprised by it. If a child is in a class or
group that during some period of the day requires its children to take
part in some high level intellectual activity, then the child will play in a
richer and more elaborated way when he is on his own. It is as if the
activity of the class playing together serves as a model for the spontane-
ous play activity of the children playing on their own.
We can ask now whether these analogous research findings about play
can help the playgroup organizer become a better engineer of the young
human soul. Well, the answer will not be as simple as one would hope.
There is little question that one can certainly improve the materials and
the atmosphere in playgroups in a way to improve the concentration of
the children and the richness of their play. That does not take very much
doing. It is the sort of thing that we do through the Preschool Playgroups
Association encouraging the construction or purchase of better materials
and the use of better approaches to play. But there is a more interesting
matter than that. It has to do with playgroup leaders and nursery school
teachers and how they improve the quality of play of children. It takes
surprisingly little to bring about small miracles. We found, for example,
if they simply listened to a recording of themselves interacting with
children-indeed, listened to it alone-they would often recognize im-
mediately what was right and what was wrong. They recognized, for
example, the extent to which they were either underestimating or over-
estimating the ability of children to take and to hold the initiative in
conversation, the extent to which they were dominating, holding back,
etc. Playgroup leaders, having listened to a tape of themselves with their
children, would often say things like: "But I don't listen enough to find
out what they're saying." Or: "I seem to be spending all of my time as a
kind of fire brigade, looking after troubles rather than helping children
with their projects." They knew intuitively what they should have done,
but circumstances often had got in their way. It does not take a massive
psychoanalysis to get these teachers back on the track! For example, our
computer told us, to our surprise, that on the average, infants in a play-
group spoke to an adult only once every nine minutes, and that in the
main, these exchanges were rather superficial. Some little experiments
in which leaders looked at themselves teaching were promising. Play

68


leaders found they could divide the labor so that one could be freed up to
interact more. This went a long way toward increasing the quality, the
frequency, and the length of conversations that children had with them.
Play leaders became interested in what could be done. Once interested,
consciousness is raised and improvement almost inevitably follows.
I doubt very much whether in any of these interventions, we really
become engineers of the human soul. What it amounts to is setting up
situations that make rich play possible. I happen to believe that rich,
elaborated, and prolonged play makes better human beings than im-
poverished, shallow, and shifting play. To that extent, I suppose, I am an
engineer. Or perhaps, just a human being with some interesting biasses.
Let me draw some very brief conclusions to all this.
To play is not just child's play. Play, for the child and for the adult alike,
is a way of using mind, or better yet, an attitude toward the use of mind. It
is a test frame, a hot house for trying out ways of combining thought and
language and fantasy. And by the same token, there is much that one can
do to help the process of growth. But do not overheat the hot house!
We must remember that children playing are not alone and are not best
alone, however much they need their periods of solitude. But as much as
they need their solitude they need to combine their ideas from their own
head with the ideas that their partners have in theirs. Call it negotiation
or whatever you will, it is the stuff not only of play but of thought. Let not
the school cultivate only the spontaneity of the individual. For human
beings need negotiation in dialogue. It will furnish the child with mod-
els and with techniques for how to operate on his own.
Finally, play under the control of the player gives to the child his first
and most crucial opportunity to have the courage to think, to talk, and
perhaps even to be himself.

69

Jerome bruner play thought language

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