Investigating the relationship between pretend play, emotion regulation skills and executive functions in preschool children

Pretend play skills, executive functions and emotion regulation skills develops rapidly during preschool years. In the literature, it is stated that cognitive and emotional skills have strong positive correlations with pretend play. The main objective of this research is to understand the role of pretend play, one of the most important gains of this age group, in executive functions and emotion regulation skills. For this purpose, children's pretend play, emotion regulation and executive function skills were studied with 65 children aged 3, 4 and 5 who were living in Ankara and continuing preschool education. Pretend play performance was measured by semi-structured observation and video was recorded. The frequency of using the body or imaginary object during play (pantomime test), substitute an object instead of another object, referring to an absent object, attribute a property to an object, script-writing behaviors were coded and the duration of the pretend play was measured. Hungry Crocodile game was used for emotion regulation skills in order to observe the reactions of the child if the game was threatened with disruption. Executive functions were measured by the Night-Day and Whispering tasks. Also, children's language (Turkish Early Language Development Test) and theory of mind skills (Appearance-Reality task) were controlled. In the pantomime test which is one of the pretend play measures, the frequency of body use decreases with age, and the frequency of using imaginary objects increases with age. The script writing skill, which is accepted as the most complex pretend play sub-skill, also increases with age. It was seen that executive function tasks were positively correlated with the frequency of using imaginary objects during the pantomime test and playing time. Play time was also found to be related to children's language and theory of mind skills. Only the Night-Day task was found to be related to the scripts created by children during play. When hierarchical regression analysis is applied on the basis of these correlation relationships, it is seen that the role of language skills on executive functions overcomes symbolic play. The reason for this was discussed that many dimensions of the pretend play performance may be related to language skills. Key words: Pretend play, executive functions, emotion regulation, language and theory of mind