The search for structural principles in children's manipulative play: a parallel with linguistic development.

Our study investigated the role of 3 structural principles--hierarchical complexity, interruption, and role change--in the development of children's construction play. The 3 principles are formally parallel to dimensions of language structure. Children from 2 to 6 were required to use varying combinations of structural features in order to build a series of modeled constructions. Predictions about the order of difficulty of our constructions, formulated on the basis of their constituent structural features, were confirmed by the results. Hierarchical complexity and role change, features of "deep structure", added significantly to the difficulty of a construction strategy. Interruption, a "surface-structure" feature, had, in contrast, a minimal effect. The results lend further support to the notion of a cognitive organization common to language and other modes of behavior.