ABSTRACT
Our humanness depends on the creation of new and transformative ways of envisioning the world. Creativity, often the product of collective work, is present whenever anyone imagines and creates something new (by selectively recombining and reworking prior cultural materials), no matter how small this might seem. Here we discuss language play and other mundane, largely unstructured practices through which family members cultivate knowledge exploration – deeply joyful engagement in inquiry about the world. Nightly walks in the neighborhood – infused with enactments, laughter, and wordplay – become adventures in opportunistic noticings, forms for perspective taking and critical thinking. Creative language (and sound) play makes use of practices such as format tying or parallelism. Improvisations based on playful recycles or format tying are central to spontaneous creativity in children’s peer interactions, creating sustained joint attention in peer and sibling disputes and play. At dinner, children use sound play and format tying to describe hypothetical events and to propose fictional versions of present and past lives. Bilingual situations provide perspicuous opportunities for poetic, affectively charged language games.
