Consistency and variability between cultures during toddlers’ naturalistic play

Play is a universal behavior that is thought to be a critical way for children to learn a wide range of motor, social, and language skills. Empirical studies of play have borne out some of the predictions of classical theories, showing that children preferentially engage with surprising stimuli, will play in order to learn, and generally show a similar progression of increasingly-complex play behaviors through infancy. Past research has also characterized the types of support and guidance that parents offer during guided play with their child, as distinguished from individual free play. However, most of these studies come from Western nations, and relatively few cross-cultural comparisons have been made, despite observations of wide variability in cultural play traditions. The goal of this study is to examine the variability and consistency of play behaviors in a large sample of 1–2-year-old children—a critical period in the development of play behaviors—in two cultural contexts: the United States and Hong Kong. Our investigation covers both individual and guided play, with measures related to joint attention, stereotypical play behaviors, language use, and types of support offered by caregivers during guided play. This rich, annotated corpus of video and audio data also provides an important resource for research on early play.