The relationship between young children’s language abilities, creativity, play, and storytelling

This study examined the connection between young children’s social play, creativity, storytelling, and language abilities. Participants were 56 primarily European American preschool children. First, to assess creativity we asked children to draw several pictures. Children created stories about their pictures during the creative process. Second, children created an original story with access to multiple ethnic family doll sets to use as props. We analysed all storytelling episodes for mean length of utterance and parts of speech. Third, we observed children’s social play behaviours over 10-minute intervals recording behaviour at 1-minute intervals. Finally, we administered the Test of Early Language Development 3 to assess children’s receptive and expressive language skills. Our findings revealed positive relationships between storytelling abilities and language abilities, relationships between type of play, storytelling, and language abilities, and connections between play and creativity and language and creativity. Our findings provide avenues for future research.