Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, Vol. 31, No.

1, 2001

Taking a Closer Look at Functional Play

in Children with Autism

Emma Williams,1,2 Vasudevi Reddy,1 and Alan Costall1

Research evidence indicates that children with autism may experience problems with func-
tional play, in addition to their well-documented deficits in symbolic play. However, as a re-
sult of the tendency of previous studies to group all functional play into a single category, the
precise nature and extent of this deficit remains unclear. The present study undertook a more
refined analysis of such play, subtyping the functional acts into various categories, in terms
of the developmental progression suggested by research with typical infants. The functional
play of children with autism was compared to that of developmentally matched children with
Down syndrome and typical infants. Although there were no group differences in overall mea-
sures of the proportion of total play time spent in functional play and in the number of func-
tional acts performed, a closer analysis of the composition of this play did reveal striking,
qualitative differences. The functional play of the autism group was less elaborated, less var-
ied, and less integrated than that of the controls. The implications of these findings are ex-
plored in relation to current theoretical models of autism and in relation to the role of other
people in mediating the appropriate use of objects.

KEY WORDS: Autism; functional play.

INTRODUCTION only as the result of a slow, hard, progressive process:

Early semiotic theories viewed symbolic develop-
ment as a gradually unfolding process, rooted firmly in
early sensorimotor behavior (Piaget, 1962; Werner &
Kaplan, 1963). Piaget (1962) proposed that symbols
emerge by means of a progressive differentiation be-
tween the “signifier” (the actual object or action used by
the child) and the “signified” (the absent object or ac-
tion being represented) which is mediated by a number
of transitional behaviors. Similarly Vygotsky (1978) por-
trayed the development of play as one involving a grad-
ual separation of meaning from the object and of mean-
ing from action. Far from arising from a sudden moment
of insight, he suggests that the decoupling comes about
1
Department of Psychology, University of Portsmouth, Portsmouth,
PO1 2DY, United Kingdom.
2 3
Address all correspondence to E. Williams, Department of Psycho-
logy, King Alfred’s College, Sparkford Road, Winchester, SO22
4NR; e-mail: e.williams@wkac.ac.uk
“The child does not do this all at once because it is ter-
ribly difficult for a child to sever the thought (the mean-
ing of a word) from the object” (p. 97). In light of these
theoretical approaches, research on children’s play has
been concerned to identify the composition of various
play behaviors at different ages and to establish the se-
quence of changes that occur with increasing maturity
(Belsky & Most, 1981; El’Konin, 1966; Fein & Apfel,
1979; Fenson, Kagan, Kearlsey, & Zelazo, 1976;
Marino, 1988; McCune-Nicolich & Fenson, 1984; Nicol-
ich, 1977; Vondra & Belsky, 1989). Three major trends
in the development of pretense were identified: decon-
textualization, which allowed pretend3 play to occur with
decreasing environmental support; decentration, where
symbolic actions are freed from the child’s body, al-
lowing the use of dolls and other people for expressing
Unless otherwise stated, where the term “pretend” or “pretense” is
used in this paper this will be taken to include both functional and
symbolic play.

67
0162-3257/01/0200-0067$19.50/0 © 2001 Plenum Publishing Corporation
68
pretend actions and allowing the adoption of others’ ac-
tions; and integration, leading to sequentially and later
hierarchically organised play (Fenson & Ramsay, 1980;
McCune-Nicolich & Fenson, 1984).
In drawing a stark, categorical distinction between
functional and symbolic play, Leslie’s (1987) analysis
of pretence represents a radical departure from previous
assumptions of a gradual evolution from simple to pro-
gressively more elaborate play behaviors (Piaget, 1962;
Vygotsky, 1978; Werner & Kaplan, 1963). According to
Leslie (1987), symbolic play can take three forms: ob-
ject substitution, the attribution of false properties, and
the attribution of presence to imaginary objects. Func-
tional play is defined as “the appropriate use of an object
or the conventional association of two or more objects,
such as a spoon to feed a doll, or placing a teacup on a
saucer” (Ungerer & Sigman, 1981, p. 320). Leslie (1987)
proposed that symbolic play is underpinned by a more
complex representational system than that which under-
lies the production of functional play. “True” pretence
(i.e., symbolic play), he argued, requires not only a first-
order representation of the pen as a rocket, for example,
but also a second-order representation about this repre-
sentation (a metarepresentation), namely, that the repre-
sentation is not true, the object is not really a rocket: “In
both functional play and error acting as if,4 the as-if com-
ponent really only exists from the observer’s point of
view. From the actor’s point of view, the actions are se-
rious. But in pretense, the actor is acting as if from the
actor’s point of view as well” (p. 414).
In other words, functional play does not necessar-
ily involve pretense (as defined by Leslie, 1987) since,
as Baron-Cohen (1987) has noted, the child may regard
a toy cooker, for example, as a small, yet real, cooker.
Leslie (1987) cited evidence that children with autism
experience particular difficulties with symbolic play
(Gould, 1986; Riguet, Taylor, Benaroya, & Klein,
1981; Sigman & Ungerer, 1984) in support of his ar-
gument that autism derives from an specific impair-
ment in the decoupling mechanism necessary for the
emergence of metarepresentations, which in turn are
required for the production of symbolic play and for
the development of a theory of mind (Baron-Cohen,
Leslie, & Frith, 1985). Baron-Cohen’s (1987) study lent
further empirical support to this hypothesis and the pro-
posed dissociation between the representational sys-
tems underlying functional and symbolic play. He
found that, although there were significant differences
4
“error acting as if” is where a child uses an object as if it was some-
thing else in error, rather than pretending it is something else, while
at the same time being aware of what the object actually is.
Williams, Reddy, and Costall
between the autism and control groups (matched for
nonverbal mental age and verbal comprehension) with
regard to the numbers of children who produced sym-
bolic acts, no such group differences were identified in
relation to the production of functional acts.
However, recent reviews of the functional and sym-
bolic play abilities of children with autism suggest that
the empirical findings may not be so clear-cut (Jarrold,
1997; Jarrold, Bouchen, & Smith, 1993; Williams,
Costall, & Reddy, 1999). For example, while Libby,
Powell, Messer, and Jordan (1998) observed no reliable
differences in the amount of time children with autism
engaged in functional play, compared to controls
matched for expressive and receptive language abilities,
other studies have found that children with autism spent
significantly less time playing functionally than learn-
ing disabled and typically developing controls (Jarrold,
Boucher, & Smith, 1996; Lewis & Boucher, 1988;
Sigman & Ungerer, 1984). In addition, where functional
acts are produced by children with autism, there is some
evidence to suggest they are less varied, integrated, and
other-directed than those produced by controls matched
for general mental age (Atlas, 1990; Wing, Gould,
Yeates, & Brierley, 1977; Sigman & Ungerer, 1984).
The identification of both quantitative and qualitative
differences in the functional play of children with
autism, along with corresponding findings that symbolic
play in structured situations is not entirely absent (Lewis
& Boucher, 1988; Libby et al., 1998; Sigman & Ungerer,
1984; Whyte & Owens, 1989) is incompatible with
those theoretical accounts which argue for a specific
metarepresentational deficit in autism and which also
insist that functional play is not reliant on the ability to
metarepresent (Baron-Cohen, 1995; Leslie, 1987).
In light of such inconsistencies alternative accounts
have been proposed which do not presume a qualita-
tive distinction between functional and symbolic play
(Harris, 1993; Jarrold, 1997; Russell, Mauthner, Sharpe
& Tidswell, 1991; Williams et al., 1999). Instead they
argue that the pattern of social-communicative deficits
characteristic of autism are a product of a general basic
underlying deficit either in executive control and plan-
ning or in relating to other people. In common with
Vygotsky (1978), executive dysfunction accounts view
the development of play as involving a gradual move
away from actions determined by externally imposed
constraints towards the imposing of internal executive
control on actions by the children themselves, such that
they can act independently from what they see (Harris,
1993; Jarrold, 1997; Russell et al., 1991). They are
therefore better able to account for the existence of
deficits in functional play in autism, in addition to the
Autism and Functional Play
widely accepted problems with symbolic acts. More re-
cently it has been proposed that deficits in the appro-
priate, functional use of objects are a logical corollary
of more basic difficulties in relating to other people
(Williams et al., 1999). People play an important role
in introducing the child to the proper use of things by
making certain aspects salient in the context of joint
attention and imitation. Thus, Williams et al. argued
that, to the extent that children with autism fail to en-
gage other people in their use of objects, or use them
to guide their own dealings with objects (Landry &
Loveland, 1988; Mundy, Sigman, Ungerer, & Sherman,
1986, 1987; Mundy, Sigman, & Kasari, 1990), they are
excluded from a great deal of information about how
to use them in functionally appropriate ways.
In view of the equivocal nature of the evidence
with regard to the functional play abilities of children
with autism, further investigations are required in order
to assess the competing claims of the metarepresenta-
tional-deficit theories versus accounts which argue for
more basic cognitive or social deficits. Furthermore
there is a need to extend the precision of measurement
and definition of functional play behaviors in order to
exclude the possibility that the failure of some studies
to find functional play deficits in children with autism
was simply the result of their use of limited measure-
ment and coding criteria. For example, Baron-Cohen’s
(1987) study compared the numbers of children in each
group who demonstrated any examples of such play but
no measure was taken of differences in either the du-
ration or the quality of the play between the groups. In
addition, the criteria for coding an act as a functional
one included the appropriate naming of an object. It
could be argued that this may have led to an overesti-
mation of the ability of the children with autism to pro-
duce functional acts as it is questionable how far nam-
ing can be said to involve an appropriate use of an
object (Jarrold, 1997). Another problem lies in the ten-
dency of previous studies to group all forms of func-
tional play under one heading. As Libby et al. (1998)
themselves noted, their failure to find functional play
deficits in the children with autism may be a result of
the lack of precision in their coding scheme. The cur-
rent study was therefore designed to take a more fine-
grained look at functional play in children with autism,
through the development of a categorization scheme
that identifies the different kinds of functional play that
can occur. Functional play acts were subtyped in order
to evaluate them in terms of the developmental pro-
gression suggested by research with typical infants and
measures were taken of their variety, frequency, dura-
tion, and integration.
69
METHOD
Participants
Forty-five children, between the ages of 11 months
and 5 years 5 months, participated in the study. These
included 15 typically developing infants, 15 children
with autism, and 15 children with Down syndrome who
were part of an ongoing research project on person-
directed play in which the authors were already partic-
ipating. The method of selection for the typical infants
was through the records of family doctors. A letter was
sent out from the doctor’s clinics to parents of suitably
aged infants requesting volunteers for the study. The
children with autism were selected by approaching pro-
fessional diagnostic clinics in the South of England.
Each child had received a primary diagnosis of child-
hood autism or autistic disorder according to the crite-
ria stated in either the International Classification of
Diseases, 10th edition (ICD-10; World Health Organi-
zation [WHO], 1990) or the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual IV (DSM-IV; American Psychiatric Association
[APA], 1994), respectively. Those with Down syndrome
were recruited with the help of the Sarah Duffen Cen-
tre (Portsmouth Down Syndrome Trust) based at the
University of Portsmouth. The children with Down syn-
drome were selected to act as a suitable control group
for the children with autism as, although they experi-
ence learning difficulties, they do not exhibit the spe-
cific problems in communication, socialization, and
imagination associated with autism. The children were
individually matched for general developmental age
using the second edition of the Bayley Scales of Infant
Development (BSID II; Bayley, 1993) which includes a
measure of both cognitive and language ability. Each
child with autism was matched to one child with Down
syndrome and one typically developing child. We de-
cided against using a nonverbal cognitive measure for
matching the groups on the grounds that this may have
selectively disadvantaged the children with autism,
given that their verbal skills are usually less advanced
than their cognitive ones. Equating the participants using
a nonverbal cognitive measure therefore runs the risk of
making a Type 1 error, as it increases the likelihood
of finding qualitative impairments in the functional
play of the children with autism. The groups were not
matched for chronological age (CA) or gender (Table I).
In addition the groups were assessed for language
production and general communicative competence
(combined receptive and expressive ability). The as-
sessment of language production was made using the
MacArthur Communicative Inventory (Fenson et al.,
70 Williams, Reddy, and Costall

Table I. Participant Characteristics each visit. These visits were made 2 weeks apart. The
procedure was designed to be naturalistic and flexible,
Groupa Typical Autistic Down
in light of the known difficulties of working with young
Male/Female 6/9 13/2 8/7 children with autism. A set of toys were laid out, in
Chronological age (months) random order, on the floor in front of the child. The
M 16.6b 48.8b,c 40.3c same toys were presented to every child who took part
SD 0.5 8.3 11.9 in the study. Before videotaping began the parent was
Range 11–24 36–62 18–65
Bayley developmental
asked if they would try and ensure that their child was
age (months) turned towards the camera. They were instructed to
M 17 16.8 17.7 respond naturally if their child showed distress or ap-
SD 4.8 4.4 5.4 proached them during the videotaped session, but to
Range 11–24 11–26 11–25 refrain from giving directions or demonstrating partic-
Vineland, communication
domain (months)
ular play behaviors. The child was then videotaped
M 16.5 15.5 18.2 playing with the toys for a total of 15 minutes. The ses-
SD 5.3 8.0 6.9 sions took place in a room of the parent’s choice, typ-
Range 9–30 7–32 7–30 ically a front room or a playroom. Videotaping was
MacArthur, language continuous, unless the child wandered out of the view
production (months)
M 15.8 14.7 17.8
of the camera, or became disengaged with the objects
SD 4.0 6.2 5.2 for longer than 30 seconds. When this happened the
Range 8–24 8–27 8–26 experimenter asked the parent to try and attract their
child’s attention to the objects. Videotaping was re-
a
n = 15 in each group. sumed when the child once again became engaged with
b
Autistic mean significantly higher than Typical at p < .0001.
the toys. Throughout this process the experimenter tried
c
Autistic mean significantly higher than Down at p < .05.
to remain as unobtrusive as possible. Following the
observation of the object play the same experimenter
administered the baseline psychometric tests.
1993) which generates scores for vocabulary produc-
tion based on parental report. A combined measure of
receptive and expressive ability was obtained using Scoring
the communication domain of the Vineland Adaptive
Play Behaviors
Behavior Scales (Sparrow, Balla, & Cicchetti, 1984)
where information is obtained from parents by means The behavior categories expanded on previous
of a semistructured interview. Psychometric tests based schemes (Baron-Cohen, 1987; Nicolich, 1977; Ungerer
on parental report were used to obtain the language & Sigman, 1981) and were further developed from an
measures in order to reduce the assessment pressure on inductive analysis of the video recordings. The ratio-
the very young children with autism. One-way analy- nale for the development of the scheme was to conduct
ses of variance revealed no significant differences be- a more detailed analysis of the functional play acts than
tween the groups of children on the scores obtained that undertaken in previous studies. The functional play
from any of the measures. behaviors were grouped into two main categories: sim-
ple functional and elaborated functional, within which
there were a number of subcategories. The terms sim-
Materials
ple and elaborated as used here are not meant to imply
The materials consisted of a set of traditional toys a qualitative distinction in the sense that Leslie (1987)
(Appendix). A Sony Camcorder (CCD F335) was used used the categories “functional” and “symbolic,” but to
for recording the play of the children as it was light, reflect the developmental progression found in typical
portable, and suitable for videotaping in small areas in development. Full details of the coding scheme are
the home, where children are likely to be mobile. given in Table II.
Ten minutes of play time for each child were ana-
lyzed from the video recordings for instances of func-
Design and Procedure
tional play, using the Observer (version 3.0) software.
Each child was visited at home either twice or A combination of video and timecode hardware (Pana-
three times, depending on how much was achieved at sonic AG 7355B VCR and RS 232 Interface) with the
Autism and Functional Play
Table II. Description of the Coding Scheme
Behavior
Simple functional play
Functional association
Functional use of single object
Elaborated functional play
Functional use of multiple objects
Functional act supported by
appropriate vocalization/gesture
Doll-directed functional acts
Observer software enabled us to code the functional play
behaviors (with their associated time codes) directly
from the videotapes to an IBM-compatible computer.
The analysis consisted of the first 10 minutes of con-
tinuous footage, excluding times where the child was
not engaged with the toys or where it was difficult to
see what they were doing. Four separate measures were
obtained: duration: the proportion of total playtime that
each child spent in a particular play category; frequency:
the total number of acts performed in each play cate-
gory; diversity: the total number of new versus re-
peated acts in each category; integration: the extent to
which the functional acts produced were appropriately
combined or integrated. These included single-scheme
and multischeme combinations (following Fenson &
Ramsay, 1980). Single-scheme combinations were de-
fined as two consecutive functional acts in which the
same action was directed towards two different recipi-
ents, for example, feeding one doll, then another doll,
or drinking from one cup and then another. This would
71
Definition and examples
The child combines two objects that are functionally related to
each other (e.g., putting a cup on a saucer, placing a lid on a
teapot, putting a peg in a hole).
The child acts on an object in a manner that reflects it’s
“proper” conventional use (e.g., bringing a baby bottle or
toy cup to the mouth, brushing own hair with a toy brush,
placing a toy telephone to the ear).
The child uses two or more objects appropriately together
accompanied by a clear supporting gesture (e.g., stirring a
spoon in a pot, tipping a jug over a cup, as if pouring some-
thing into it. To be included in this category a child must
stir the spoon around, rather than simply place it in the pot,
thus distinguishing the behavior from simple functional
association.
The child acts on an object in a manner that reflects its “proper”
conventional use and accompanies this with an appropriate
vocalization or exaggerated gesture (e.g., placing a toy
telephone to the ear and vocalizing, making slurping noises
while drinking from a baby bottle, drinking from a cup and
throwing head back in an exaggerated drinking gesture).
Acts involving the appropriate use of multiple objects which
also include a relevant vocalization or exaggerated gesture
were coded in this category.
The child carries out an act involving the use of a doll
(e.g., brushing a doll’s hair with a toy brush, putting a doll
in the bath). Acts involving a doll accompanied by a relevant
vocalization were coded in this category.
exclude cases where the same action pattern is per-
formed on a series of objects indiscriminately, for ex-
ample, shaking a rattle, then shaking a doll, then a baby
bottle. Multischeme combinations were defined as the
juxtaposition of two or more different functional acts
directed towards the same recipient. These acts could
either follow each other in a logically ordered sequence,
such as tipping a teapot over a cup, then putting the cup
to the mouth and making slurping noises, or reflect no
essential order, for example putting a doll in the bath,
then feeding the doll. The component functional acts
and integrated/combined functional acts were coded as
separate analyses, in order to avoid the loss of impor-
tant information about a child’s play performance, with
regard to both quality and diversity. This means that in
the analysis of component acts the actions of stirring a
spoon around in one cup and then in another would be
coded as two elaborated functional acts, one new (if it
had been performed by the child for the first time) and
one repeated. In the analysis of the level of integration
72 Williams, Reddy, and Costall

of the functional acts the same actions would be scored
as one integrated single scheme combination.
The reliability of the coding scheme was assessed
by having a trained graduate student code four tapes,
randomly selected, from each of the groups of children.
This amounted to approximately 25% of the corpus. Al-
though the graduate was aware of the first author’s area
of research, she was blind to the specific purpose of the
current study. The student was previously trained in the
coding procedure and operation of the Observer sys-
tem, using six tapes, two from each of the groups. Re-
liability coding was begun once a satisfactory overall
percentage agreement of 70% or more was reached dur-
ing training, between the graduate coder and the first
author. The resulting Cohen’s kappas were all within
acceptable limits. Those for the five functional play cat-
egories listed in Table II ranged from .79–.91 with a
mean of .84. Kappas for new versus repeated and inte-
grated versus nonintegrated functional acts were .81
and .75 respectively (Cohen, 1960).
RESULTS
Exploratory data analysis revealed that the as-
sumptions both of normality and homogeneity of vari-
ance between groups were not satisfied. As a result the
decision was made to use nonparametric statistics (Field,
2000). A Friedman two-way ANOVA by ranks revealed
that there were no significant differences between the
three groups of children in the total amount of play time
spent in functional play acts, χ2 (2) = 0.93, ns, or in the
total number of functional acts produced, χ2 (2) = 2.48,
ns. However, finer analysis did reveal reliable
differences in both the variety and quality of the func-
tional play between the different groups of children.
Diversity of Functional Play
New versus repeated functional acts. The func-
tional play was first broken down into new and repeated
acts to examine its diversity (Table III). A Friedman
two-way ANOVA revealed a significant difference be-
tween the three groups with respect to both the num-
ber of new acts produced, χ2 (2) = 8.87, p = .012 and
the mean percentage of total time coded spent per-
forming new functional acts with the toys, χ2 (2) = 8.13,
p = .017. Pairwise comparisons using the Wilcoxon
signed rank test indicated that the children with autism
spent significantly less of their play time in perform-
ing new functional acts relative to both the typical in-
fants (z = 2.27, p = .023) and the children with Down
syndrome (z = 3.81, p = .001). (SPSS version 7.51 now
automatically converts the T to a z value, so that it can
calculate the exact probability of the test statistic by

Table III. Mean Duration (as a Percentage of Total Play Time) and Mean Frequency of Different
Types of Functional Play Behaviors Produced by Each Group of Children

Typical Autistic Down

Type of functional play M SD M SD M SD

Simple
% Duration 7.18 8.00 13.64 11.22 11.68 9.69
Frequency 7.60 6.39 12.60 11.21 12.40 9.37
Elaborated
% Duration 10.44 11.68 0.10a 0.37 10.07 7.85
Frequency 8.27 8.82 0.13a 0.52 7.93 7.59
New
% Duration 8.21 7.48 2.83b 1.83 8.82 4.86
Frequency 7.33 4.86 3.40b 1.96 7.80 4.16
Repeated
% Duration 9.47 9.05 10.95 10.53 12.97 11.92
Frequency 8.67 6.72 9.47 10.60 12.53 12.15
Integrated
% Duration 3.29 5.88 0.10c 0.37 2.84 4.17
Frequency 1.33 1.95 0.07c 0.26 1.07 1.28

a
Autistic mean significantly lower than both Down and Typical at p < .01.
b
Autistic mean significantly lower than Down at p < .01 and from Typical at p < .05.
c
Autistic mean significantly lower than both Down and Typical at p < .05.
Autism and Functional Play
approximation to the normal distribution, Field, 2000.)
They also produced significantly fewer new functional
play acts than either the typically developing infants
(z = 2.59, p = .01) or the children with Down syndrome
(z = 2.84, p = .005). There were no significant differ-
ences between the other two groups in either frequency
or duration of new functional play acts produced. A
Friedman two-way ANOVA indicated no significant
differences between the groups with respect to the pro-
portion of the total playtime spent producing acts that
were repetitions of previous ones and the total number
of repeated acts performed.
Quality of Functional Play
Simple and elaborated functional play. The func-
tional play was further broken down into simple func-
tional play acts and more elaborated functional play acts
(see Table III). Friedman tests were performed to com-
pare the groups on both the number of simple and elab-
orated acts produced and the percentage of total time
spent in performing each kind of play act. Although
there were no significant differences between the groups
on either of these measures with respect to simple func-
tional play acts, there were highly reliable differences
between the different children in both the duration, χ2
(2) = 14.58, p = .001, and frequency, χ2 (2) = 14.58,
p = .001, of elaborated functional play behaviors. Pair-
wise comparisons revealed that the children with autism
spent less of their total play time performing elaborated
functional acts than both the children with Down syn-
drome (z = 3.18, p = .001) and the typical infants (z =
2.85, p = .004) and, in addition, produced fewer of these
type of acts than the Down (z = 3.19, p < .001) and typ-
ical (z = 2.85, p = .004) groups (see Table III). There
were no differences between these latter groups with re-
spect to either of the measures of elaborated functional
play. The children with autism produced significantly
fewer elaborated functional acts relative to simple func-
tional acts (z = 3.30, p = .001) and spent less of their
total play time in performing elaborated acts (z = 3.30,
p = .001) compared to simple functional acts. In fact
only 1 of the 15 children with autism produced any act
in this category, compared to 11 of the typical children
and 13 of the Down group. In contrast there were no
differences in these two categories of play in the other
two groups of children.
Subcategories of simple and elaborated functional
play. In addition to analyses of the main categories of
functional play (simple and elaborated), between-group
differences in the subcategories of simple functional
play were also investigated. As the children with autism
73
produced virtually no elaborated functional play, analy-
ses of group differences between the children with
autism and the two control groups in these subcategories
were not undertaken. Wilcoxon matched-pairs tests
showed that the only significant difference with regard
to the subcategories of simple functional play was the
greater amount of time spent by the children with
autism in acts involving the functional use of single
objects (z = 1.93, p = .053) relative to the typically de-
veloping infants. There were no significant differences
between the Down and typical groups in any of the five
subcategories.
Correlations of Developmental age with elabo-
rated functional play. Within-group correlations were
performed for the typical and Down groups between
the children’s Bayley scores and the proportion of time
spent in elaborated functional play, in order to assess
whether the more developmentally advanced children
produced the most advanced play. Kendall’s Tau was
used, rather than the Spearman’s coefficient, due to the
number of tied ranks (Field, 2000). A highly positive
relationship was found between developmental age and
the proportion of elaborated functional play in the typ-
ical group (Kendall’s T = 0.65, p = .001). In the case
of the Down group the correlation coefficient was much
more modest (Kendall’s T = 0.32, p = .05) though still
significant. It was not possible to perform a correlation
in the case of the children with autism, given that they
produced virtually no elaborated functional play.
Integrated Functional Play
Although little integrated functional play occurred
in any of the groups of children, Friedman tests revealed
significant between-group differences in duration, χ2
(2) = 5.89, p = .05, and frequency, χ2 (2) = 5.89, p =
.05. Both the typical and Down syndrome groups spent
more time in integrated sequences of functional acts
(typical: z = 2.20, p = .028, Down: z = 2.31, p = .021)
and produced a higher frequency of such actions (typi-
cal: z = 2.12, p < .034, Down: z = 2.39, p = .016).
DISCUSSION
Summary of Findings
Although the children with autism spent less time
engaged in functional play and produced fewer func-
tional acts than either of the control groups, these dif-
ferences did not reach significance. However, a closer
analysis of the composition of the functional play shown
by each of the groups did reveal distinct differences in
74
terms of its diversity, elaboration, and integration. In
contrast to the children with Down syndrome and the
typically developing infants, who spent equal amounts
of time in simple and elaborated functional play, the
functional play produced by the autistic group consisted
almost entirely of simple acts involving single objects,
such as bringing a cup to the mouth, or pushing a car
along the ground. In fact, only one child with autism pro-
duced any behavior that could be classed in the elabo-
rated functional play category. Further analysis of the
diversity of functional acts revealed that the children
with autism produced fewer different acts than the typ-
ical or Down syndrome children and spent less of their
play time in functional play that was new compared to
both control groups. The children with autism also spent
less time in integrated functional play and produced
fewer functional sequences than the controls. Caution
needs to be exercised in relation to this latter finding,
however, as only half of the children in each of the con-
trol groups produced integrated functional combinations.
In order to examine this particular aspect of play a more
developmentally advanced group would be required.
Problems in Decontextualization, Decentration,
and Integration
The finding that the functional play of children
with autism is less elaborated, less diverse, and less in-
tegrated than that shown by the control groups is not
consistent with the theory-of-mind hypothesis that this
type of play should be intact, whereas “symbolic” play
(the only play supposedly involving metarepresentation)
is impaired (Baron-Cohen et al., 1985). Rather, it sug-
gests that the children with autism experience problems
at a much earlier point than that where “true symbolic
play” (according to the definition of Leslie, 1987) is
said to emerge. Early forms of pretend play occur when
the infant takes functional acts, such as putting a spoon
to the mouth or talking on the telephone, and reproduces
them in play. These are decontextualized behaviors, de-
tached from the situational context in which they orig-
inally occurred and goals they usually accomplish (e.g.,
eating or communicating). Research investigating the
play behavior of typical infants suggests that this
process begins with initial approximations, such as
bringing a toy spoon to the lips, which are then elabo-
rated (e.g., bringing a spoon to the lips and smacking
the lips) before becoming gradually less dependent on
the conventional object being present, so that a substi-
tute object, such as a rod, can replace the spoon (Vondra
& Belsky, 1991). The finding that almost all of the func-
tional acts produced by the children with autism are
Williams, Reddy, and Costall
those which occur at the earliest stage of this decon-
textualization process, such as bringing a bottle, cup, or
spoon to the mouth, may indicate a difficulty in elabo-
rating on their initial ability to associate a particular
object function with a particular miniaturised toy.
Likewise, the data from this study provide some ev-
idence indicating that the children with autism may have
difficulty in making the transition from self-directed to
other-directed functional play. Initially, pretend actions
are directed towards the self, for example, the child
brushes their own hair, before being directed towards
another, such as their parent or a doll, and then to these
as an agent. No child with autism showed any functional
act with a doll, whereas doll-directed acts were the most
common elaborated functional acts produced by both
control groups. Although no category of self-directed
functional play was included in the coding scheme, a
review of the tapes revealed that all groups of children
produced, on average, two different self-directed func-
tional acts, suggesting that those with autism did not
have a particular difficulty with this kind of functional
play. However, to fully support the proposal that chil-
dren with autism experience difficulties in decentra-
tion, a dimension of self- versus other-directed functional
acts would need to be included in the coding scheme.
Although a high level of sequencing of functional acts
was not demonstrated by any of the groups, there is ad-
ditional evidence that supports the interpretation that
the children with autism may be at an earlier point than
the controls in the move towards the integration of pre-
tend play. It could be argued that the subcategories,
functional use of multiple objects and functional acts
supported by relevant vocalization/exaggerated gestures,
also involve a degree of integration. Only one child
with autism produced an act that could be classed in
either of these categories.
The finding that the children with autism produced
virtually no elaborated functional play, along with the
significant positive correlations5 indicating that in both
control groups the more developmentally advanced chil-
dren tended to produce the most advanced functional
play, suggests that the children with autism were at a
lower level of development in play than the other chil-
dren. However, the findings of this study do not, nec-
essarily, point simply to a developmental delay in the
case of the children with autism. The reduced diversity
and elaboration of their functional play may be better
5
The more modest correlation coefficient found in the Down group
may be explained by the lower levels of variation among the chil-
dren with Down syndrome in the amount of elaborated functional
play produced, relative to the typically developing children.
Autism and Functional Play
explained, not as a result of any specific problems with
functional play per se, but as stemming from more gen-
eral difficulties, whether in executive functioning, in
relating to other people, or a combination of both.
Executive Dysfunction Hypothesis
In two particular respects the data from this study
are more consonant with the predictions of those theo-
rists who propose that autism is an executive disorder,
rather than one involving a metarepresentational deficit.
First, the finding that the functional play of the chil-
dren with autism was less diverse than that of the con-
trols and involved proportionately more repetition than
novelty is consistent with the predictions made by pro-
ponents of an executive dysfunction in autism. The
production of fewer different functional acts can be
explained as a result of the difficulty that individuals
with autism have in generating new schemes. Accord-
ing to this approach the predominance of repetitive over
novel functional behavior might arise as a secondary
consequence of the primary deficit in generating alter-
native behavior (Jarrold, 1997). The converse is also
possible, that a tendency to engage in perseverative be-
havior interferes with the initiation of new acts (Lewis
& Boucher, 1988; Russell et al., 1991). The production
of fewer new acts, whether a product of generative or
perseverative executive deficits, may serve to disrupt
the differentiation process, delaying the emergence of
more elaborated functional and symbolic play acts. Sec-
ond, the finding of qualitative differences in the func-
tional play produced by the autistic group is not in-
consistent with the executive dysfunction hypothesis
which, unlike the metarepresentational account, does
not make an a priori distinction between functional and
symbolic play (Jarrold, 1997). According to this ap-
proach pretense develops gradually, with the develop-
mental trends of decontextualization and decentration
observed in typical development reflecting a shift away
from externally driven and habitual schemes towards
more flexible, internally generated, and planned action
(Harris, 1993; Jarrold, 1997).
Social Deficit Hypothesis
Another plausible hypothesis is that the problems
lie not with the production of functional schemes but
with their acquisition. Conventional actions on objects
are not predetermined but are acquired from other mem-
bers of the social group (Leontiev, 1981; Loveland,
1991; Rocissano, 1982; Valsiner, 1987; Williams et al.,
1999). According to this proposition the lower diver-
75
sity and elaboration of functional play exhibited by the
children with autism might arise as a consequence of
their difficulties in relating to other people, rather than
deficits in executive functioning. Parents and caregivers
play a crucial role in introducing their child to the
shared meanings of things. They highlight the salient
features of objects, explicitly demonstrate their func-
tional use, physically structure their child’s actions with
an object, verbally suggest (and prompt) functional
acts, and provide a model (not necessarily intentional)
for their child to imitate. It is likely that such processes
of social mediation would be seriously disrupted in
the case of young children with autism who show spe-
cific deficits in language, imitation, and joint attention
(Abrahamson & Mitchell, 1990; Dawson & Adams,
1984; Landry & Loveland, 1988; Loveland & Landry,
1986; Mundy et al., 1986; Smith & Bryson, 1994) and
have particular problems in making use of other peo-
ple’s actions and affective responses to objects to guide
their own use of the same objects (Sigman, Kasari,
Kwon, & Yirmiya, 1992).
Problems in using other people as a source of guid-
ance for how to use particular objects may account for
the reduced diversity of the functional play produced by
the children with autism. Without inspiration from other
people these children are left with their own, more lim-
ited, ideas of interesting actions on objects (Lord, 1985).
The finding that the children with autism had particular
difficulty with elaborated, but not simple, functional play
could be explained as a result of the former being much
more dependent than the latter on mediation by other
people. Whereas simple functional acts such as pushing
a car along the ground, or bringing a baby bottle to the
mouth, can be acquired through instruction by other peo-
ple, they could equally well be arrived at through soli-
tary exploration of the object itself (see Rocissano,
1982). In other words, the physical structure of the ob-
ject itself may help to shape the functional action with-
out a need to fully appreciate its significance in social-
behavioral terms. This raises the question of whether
such acts indeed necessarily represent a “functional” use
of a toy from the child’s point of view, or only from our
own. In contrast, the nature of the object itself is insuf-
ficient to support or constrain the production of elabo-
rated functional acts, which are less open to acquisition
via solitary exploration. Such conventional actions may
require a greater degree of participation with other peo-
ple in a shared environment “which predisposes people
to use objects, interpret events, and so on, in particular
ways” (Loveland, 1991, p. 110). To produce acts such
as vocalizing on a toy phone or putting a doll to bed, the
child needs to go beyond the physical properties of an
76
object and appreciate its social significance (Lord, 1985).
A third position is also possible, that executive dys-
functions and impoverished social interactions both im-
pact adversely on play in autism. Children with autism
may be thrown back on their own ideas of interesting
actions as a result of a difficulty in learning about ob-
jects from other people, which is further compounded
by problems in generating knowledge-of-object-use
schemes. Problems in elaborating on simple functional
acts may therefore reflect a lesser degree of participa-
tion with other people in a shared environment combined
with a difficulty in moving away from actions deter-
mined by externally imposed constraints.
Future Studies
The ways in which specific executive and social
deficits might impact adversely on the play of children
with autism need to be explored further. The issue of
the social mediation of object use has been particularly
neglected. To assess how difficulties in social interac-
tion might affect the development of functional play in
children with autism object-centered play with parents
needs to be examined. However it is not only the de-
velopment of functional play in autism that requires
further research. What is needed are longitudinal stud-
ies following the development of play over time, both
solitary and dyadic, using a detailed coding scheme to
cover play behaviors from the earliest manipulations to
the most elaborate forms of pretense. At present we
know virtually nothing about the precursors to func-
tional play in young children with autism and such stud-
ies would enable us to examine how early behaviors
might impact on later ones. Gender and CA also need
to be taken into account in future studies, as both could
affect the child’s experience with the toys.
In conclusion, although the data from this study
do not address the question of the relationship between
functional and symbolic play (as defined by Leslie,
1987), it has clearly revealed qualitative differences in
the functional play of the children with autism that
would not be predicted by the metarepresentational
theory of symbolic play.
APPENDIX
List of Toys Used in Study
Tea-set (including cups, saucers, jug, plates, bowls
and cutlery)
Two dolls
Williams, Reddy, and Costall
Baby bottle
Bath
Cloth (30 × 20 cms.)
Cooker (Hob)
A selection of plastic food
Two saucepans
Hand puppet
Finger puppet
Train
Police car
Sports car
Small ball
Rattle
Telephone
Hair brush
Dustpan and brush
Music box
Plastic hinged box
Watering-can
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research was supported by Grant R00023
4949 from the Economic and Social Research Council.
We are extremely grateful to all the parents and chil-
dren who participated in this study for their time, in-
terest and helpfulness. We also thank Sarah Libby,
Mike Van Duuren, and three anonymous reviewers for
their invaluable comments on earlier versions of the
manuscript.
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