ABSTRACT
The role of play in human life has been discussed at least as far back as Heraclitus in Western philosophical and scientific traditions, and it figures in ancient Hindu traditions and doubtless elsewhere in early times. For the study of language play and child development the two most important lines of research and theory building have been the psychological and the anthropological. The first type of play to consider is babbling, which is a major factor in the development of the phonetic substrate required for phonological organization. Phonological development in early speech is characterized by certain universal patterns of acquisition. Developmentalists have often noted that as children grow older many of the games they play become more elaborate and the rules of the games become more conscious, explicit, and socially prescribed. Social play in the sense of conventional games with explicit rules may have its origins in mother-child interaction routines in infancy.
