Digital and physical play contexts influence mother-child spatial language and maternal questions.

Abstract

Playing with spatial toys is associated with increased spatial skills, which are important for success in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Past research on spatial play has focused on physical toys, but digital games that require spatial thinking are increasingly popular, with limited research examining how children and their parents engage with them. The present study aimed to address these gaps by examining how play context impacts mothers' and children's spatial talk and mothers' use of scaffolding behavior, specifically question-asking. Mother-child dyads (N = 60, M = 71.3 months, SD = 7.4 months, 30 female) coplayed with digital spatial games and matched physical toys across two sessions. The digital games included tangram puzzles (Dragon Shapes app) and block-building (Minecraft app), and physical toys were designed to match the digital games. During digital play compared to physical play, mothers and children spoke fewer spatial words, used different spatial language types, and mothers asked fewer questions, including pedagogical questions that aim to promote learning. Further analyses examined the dimensionality of the activities and children's prior play experiences. In an increasingly digital world, it is important to understand how spatial play, whether in physical or digital form, impacts children's spatial development. By demonstrating how mothers and children change their behavior between digital and physical play, this study adds to the growing research on how parents can support their children's engagement with and learning from digital technology. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).