Games are activities that are fun and enjoyable for the person playing the game, are carried out with internal motivation, do not contain an external goal, and are carried out spontaneously and voluntarily with the active participation of the individuals participating in the game. Play has an important place in child development due to its contribution to children's cognitive, physical, social and emotional development. Lifter and Bloom (1998) suggested that play has two functions for the child.
The first of these is that, similar to language, it is one of the ways that children can use to concretize and reveal the symbols of what is in their minds. Therefore, play is one of the child's ways of expressing himself. Secondly, play is a tool for children to learn the objects, events and relationships in their environment by interpreting the results of their own actions and reviewing their previous knowledge, and therefore has an interpretive function. With all this, play is also one of the ways children show what they know about the world around them. In addition to symbolic understanding, play development is important in understanding how objects work and how actions affect the results, how individuals behave in certain situations, and in the process of understanding interpersonal relationships.
Baby and parents begin to play mutually from birth. Babies can show play initiation behavior when they are 6 weeks old. Their ability to adapt to social games develops on average in the 13th week, and babies give signals that they are ready to start playing during this period. Depending on the child's cognitive development, game development is also divided into stages. Piaget (1951) suggested that play in children is related to cognitive development and discussed play development in three developmental stages: 1) practice games, 2) symbolic play and 3) games with rules. According to Piaget, practice games can be considered as sensory-motor games that aim to discover objects that develop in children's early periods, and are revealed through behaviors such as hitting and throwing. According to Piaget, symbolic play, which develops after practice games, occurs when the child begins to create representations in his mind for the objects around him, that is, with the development of cognitive symbolic thinking. It is an emerging type of game. Symbolic play can be presented in three ways: using objects instead of another object, adding new features to the object (making the baby sick, etc.) and pretending to exist for something that does not exist in the game. Games with rules, which is the third developmental play stage, are games such as football and hide and seek played within the framework of predetermined rules.
Children with ASD show different characteristics from each other in their play development, related to individual differences in their social and cognitive development and language proficiency. . Stone et al. (1990), in their study comparing the play and imitation behaviors of children with ASD, mentally retarded, hearing impaired, language impaired and normally developing children, found that children with ASD interacted with toys to a lesser extent than all groups. They found that children with ASD performed lower than other groups in the behaviors of using toys appropriately and engaging in functional play actions. Researchers have determined that imitation and functional play behaviors distinguish children with ASD from other groups, and they have suggested that limitations in play skills and imitation development are behaviors specific to ASD. Children with ASD may make unusual play preferences compared to their typically developing peers or may be overly interested in a distinctive feature of the object used in the game. Naturally, the play behavior of children with ASD consists of play actions with poor diversity, flexibility and creativity.
With a study on object use behaviors in children with ASD, Rowland and Schweigert (2009) found that children with ASD between the ages of 2-5 They found that they showed lower performance than their typically developing peers in social use of the object, symbolic use, behaviors of obtaining an unreachable object and use of the object in accordance with its function, and they received low scores especially in symbolic use of the object and social use behaviors. In addition, children with ASD exhibit more repetitive behavior when using objects than typically developing children. The first years of life of children with ASD It has been revealed by examining retrospective video analyzes that children exhibit more mouthing behaviors than normally developing children. In another study conducted by analyzing retrospective video recordings, Baranek et al. (2005) compared the object play of children with ASD between the ages of 9 and 12 months with normally developing children and children with developmental delays. In this study, it was found that there was no significant difference between the object interest rates of children with ASD and other groups. More importantly, it was found that there was no significant difference between exploratory play rates. According to the results of the research, functional play behavior with objects emerged only in normally developing children between 9 and 12 months of age, and functional play behaviors could not be observed in the other two groups. Children's interactions with objects in their environment reflect their understanding of the social world and their knowledge of how to use objects to achieve a desired outcome. Interaction behaviors with the object do not only include physical manipulation of the object, but also show the individual interacting with the object's knowledge of how objects are used, which paths to use to reach the desired object, the relationship between objects, and the relationship between the individual and the object. Object relations mostly emerge through play behaviors with objects in normally developing children and make significant contributions to the child's cognitive and social development.
In children with ASD, limitations are observed in play development as well as object use, starting from an early age. 18-24 in children with ASD. Between months, limitations are observed in symbolic skills or representational thinking competencies. In their study examining the communication behaviors of children with ASD, Charman et al. (1997) found that 20-month-old children with ASD exhibited more limited pretend play than typically developing children, and that there was no significant difference between the three groups in functional play behaviors. As a result of this study, researchers suggested that the disorders seen in play were only related to symbolic play behaviors. In the study, children with ASD were exposed to situations that were modeled and given cues. They found that even children showed limitations in using one object symbolically instead of another. Wetherby et al. (2007), 18-24. They found that children with developmental delay and ASD showed significantly lower performance in their symbolic skills and representational object use proficiency when compared to typically developing children in both children with developmental delay and ASD. The limitations experienced by children with ASD in their symbolic play skills have been demonstrated by many studies. As a result of their research, Libby et al. (1998) examined the spontaneous play participation behaviors of children with ASD by comparing them with children with Down syndrome and normally developing children matched according to their verbal development level, and found that children with ASD experienced limitations in playing symbolic games compared to the other two groups, especially in the number of symbolic play actions. They found that this difference was seen more clearly when taken into consideration. It was observed that there was no significant difference between their functional play behaviors, however, they exhibited more sensory-motor play than the other groups. Williams et al. (2001) suggested that although children with ASD exhibited functional play at the same rate as their peers, there were serious differences regarding the quality of the play. In their research, they found that play in children with ASD is limited, especially in terms of the variety, detail and complementarity of play schemes. Children with ASD, compared to children with developmental disabilities who are matched according to their verbal language performance and play level, are more likely to exhibit symbolic play behaviors such as not being aware that they are creating meaning in the play, adding less fun-like schemes to the play, not creating symbolic meanings, and generally engaging in creative and entertaining play. There are limitations in their qualities.
As a result, when the literature is examined, it is seen that children with ASD experience limitations in their play skills from an early age, and that they perform lower than normally developing children with developmental delays, especially in symbolic play skills. Since symbolic play skills are related to language development, symbolic play is important in children with ASD. It is thought that limitations in children's skills may play an important role in language development.
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