Scholarly Works - Education
How toddlers think with their hands: social and private gestures as evidence of cognitive self-regulation in guided play with objects.
Basilio, Marisol
Rodríguez, Cintia
Early Child Development and Care
Basilio, M., & Rodríguez, C. (2016). How toddlers think with their hands: social and private gestures as evidence of cognitive self-regulation in guided play with objects.. Early Child Development and Care https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2016.1202944
The role of language as a tool to support the self-regulation has been widely studied, yet there is little evidence on the role of prelinguistic communication in the early development of self-regulation. To address this gap we developed behavioural indicators of preverbal cognitive self-regulation, and described how can parents support it through guided play. We observed 16 children at 14, 16 and 18 months interacting with two complex toys, either independently or with a parent. A microanalytic coding captured a total of 721 gestures, of which 473 were classed as self-regulatory. Children used gestures to support self-regulation in planning monitoring, control, and evaluation. Analysis of parental mediation revealed a relationship between supporting autonomy, providing challenge, responsiveness, effective communication, children's competence with objects, and self-regulatory gestures. We produced reliable indicators of self-regulation through gestures and characterised effective parental mediation, thus making explicit key social mechanisms to foster self-regulation in preverbal development.
self-regulation, private gestures, guided play, scaffolding, pragmatic of objects
This research was kindly supported by CONICYT Chile through a scholarship for doctoral studies at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid granted to the first author, and a Research and Innovation grant awarded to the second author (EDU2011-2780 I+D+i) by the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain.
External DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2016.1202944