The purpose of the study was to consider the value of 'play' activities in the infant school in relation to language development. Linguistic analyses were made of samples of the language of five year old children to determine functional and structural characteristics. Piaget's functional classification was applied together with a transformational analysis.
Results confirmed the value of play activities for language development and illustrated the nature of linguistic interaction amoung groups of children. The transformational analysis gave a detailed description of the language sampled.
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