Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The impact of play on childrens cognitive skills has gained interest lately. This study examines the efficacy of a pre-tend play intervention on the self-regulation and language skills of four- to five-year-olds with English as an additionallanguage. During pretend play an individual uses ones imagination to project a mental representation onto reality. Thesample included 151 children who were randomized into three groups: (a) Pretend play; (b) Art activities; (c) Typicalcurriculum. The intervention included sixteen 30-minute sessions in groups of six children. The design of the pretendplay intervention is based on storybook reading with an adult, and subsequent role-playing with props related to the story.During storybook reading explicit phonological awareness and vocabulary instruction were provided for the target words.In terms of the results, the children in the pretend play group had significantly higher post-test phonological awarenessscores than children who were exposed to typical curriculum.