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NAMING GAMES AND BEYOND: 
REFERENCING IN CHILDREN’S VERBAL PLAY 

JOHN HOLMES MCDOWELL

— What’s the difference between an elephant and a loaf of bread?
— I don’t know.
— Remind me not to send you to the grocery store. 
 (Traditional interrogative routine)

Children are, among other things, little thinking machines. Childhood is a 
period of intense mental activity wherein the child’s innate cognitive capacities 
work upon the raw data of sensory experience, guided by interpretive codes 
drawn from the ambient culture, to fashion serviceable portraits of reality 
capturing the possibilities of the moment but always evolving through time. With 
only a small stretch of the imagination, we can picture young children as mad-
cap scientists, boldly trying out theories, testing hypotheses, and adjusting their 
notions as to what is going on as new data arrives. It is a conspicuous fact that a 
considerable portion of this mental work is accomplished in settings of pleasurable 
social intercourse, frequently through the framework of play, and it is this 
dimension of the child’s mental development that I want to address in this paper. 
Specifically, I want to highlight a thread of children’s verbal play that pursues 
the linguistic theme of referencing, that is, the naming, describing, and evoking 
of objects, and follow this thread progressively from an initial moment, when 
the interlocutors are adult care-takers or older siblings, to a subsequent moment 
when the child becomes empowered as the agent of play and the interlocutors 
are its juvenile playmates. Culling material from research I have done with 
children’s verbal play and verbal art over the years, I will describe and analyze the 
transformation of “the naming game” and “the animal voices game” of late infancy 
to “the riddling game” of the primary school years. 

There is a cluster of significant propositions at stake in this incursion into the 
mental development of children. One piece is the emergence of agency in the 
young child. We are accustomed to thinking of children in the first two years of 
life as being essentially passive recipients of communicative gestures originating 
from adults, older siblings, and other older children in their environments. A trend 
in current research throws this assumption into doubt (Dissanayake 2001; Meltzoff 
2007) , and I hope to contribute to the questioning of the young child’s passivity 
— let’s call it the passivity paradigm — by showing how children as young as 
12-16 months assert their agency in acquiring active control over familiar playful 
routines. Two crucial developments can be observed here: first, the child rather 
quickly becomes the initiator of the sequence, and second, before long, the child 
learns to subvert the routine’s logic by deliberately supplying “suspect” or “wrong” 
contributions. 

A second proposition of interest in this analysis is the centrality of play, and 
particularly verbal play, in the development of children’s cognition and the child’s 

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realization of self. Adults have often exhibited impatience with children at play, 
and children’s play frequently departs from adult canons of perspicacity. We have 
numerous accounts of attempts to limit, contain, and sometimes even exterminate 
the play of children, which seems to always find outlets that circumvent these 
adult-imposed measures (Sutton-Smith 1995). The materials at hand for this 
study underscore the utilitarian dimensions of play, enabling us to see the arenas 
of children’s play as vital, engaging, and rewarding learning environments. 
Obviously, not all children’s play is verbal, but the materials for this study affirm 
verbal play as key among the arenas of children’s play, one that absorbs a great 
deal of the child’s time and energy, and one that is readily accessible to close 
inspection by those of us who seek to understand the mind of the child. 

 At last, the approach I will elaborate in this paper — we could call it the 
agency paradigm — proposes a specific understanding of human nature and 
human society, since the prototype we will isolate in children’s verbal play can 
be projected well beyond childhood; indeed, it can serve as a template for the 
continuously evolving human personality. In this vision of things, we are all, 
throughout our entire lives, interacting with others, often in playful modes, and in 
the process calibrating our conjectures on the way things work. This process may 
be more dramatic in childhood, where the learning curve takes us from zero to 
socially competent in the space of just a handful of years. And it is possible that 
the child’s processing of reality is qualitatively different from what happens later 
in life. For instance, close observation of children’s play suggests that children 
possess a freedom to toy with cultural codes that diminishes as the person 
approaches and enters adulthood. The child’s delight in “silliness” and a striking 
capacity for metaphorical thought and expression are two indices suggestive of 
age-defined difference. But the larger linkage remains, I believe, foregrounding 
the child’s acquisition of agency and understanding through social play as a 
universally human enterprise.

The Naming Game 

Visualize this familiar scene: a young child is seated on an adult’s lap, with a 
picture-book in hand. The child is in the early stages of language acquisition — it 
has a small vocabulary but cannot piece together much in the way of phrases as 
of yet. The adult pauses over images on the page to inquire of the child: “What’s 
this?” The naming game begins with this pointing and questioning. Catherine 
Garvey (1984: 62-71) sees in these collaborations a key conceptual maneuver, “the 
ability to indicate an entity for attention, for either one’s own or another’s benefit,” 
and she locates it early in the second year of life. In order for the naming game to 
run smoothly, the child must realize that specific items can be isolated and named; 
hence, the naming game, in its opening gambit, is an adult-initiated rehearsal of 
essential cognitive skills. 

In this basic version, the naming game evinces a patterned set of participant 
turns. A round of the game begins when the adult points and inquires, “What’s 
this?” The child might respond with a possible label; if it does and the answer is 
deemed to be correct, the adult will confirm the child’s response and perhaps 

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repeat it. If the child does not respond, the adult is likely to provide the intended 
label: “A horse” (for example). Garvey (1984, 63) describes a pattern of increasing 
demand: “the caregiver becomes more exacting as the child learns to respond: at 
first, any response will be accepted, then any vocalization, then only the correct 
label.” Through this series of approximations, adult and child participate in an 
activity initiated and controlled by the adult; the child’s role is restricted to that 
of acquiring and articulating the appropriate responses. The child is an active 
player but the passivity paradigm accounts adequately for what is happening here 
— culture is being inculcated from adult to child.

But Garvey (1984, 63) anticipates the next version of the game: “the child, once 
he learns the sequence of moves, often exchanges roles and begins to lead the 
game himself.” Before long, and under the right circumstances — a good comfort 
level, for example — the child is likely to seize the initiative, perhaps pointing 
at an object pictured and looking at the adult in expectation of an answer, or 
reproducing the interrogative move, “What’s this?” This reversal of roles installs the 
child as initiator of a round of play, and shifts the adult into the more limited role 
of responder. In this vignette, we can perceive the assumption of agency in the 
very young child, perhaps, as Garvey suggests, early in its second year of life. The 
child has learned not only how to respond appropriately but also how to perform 
the complementary role in the game. This mastery allows the child to select which 
objects to isolate and name, and also to bend the adult’s behavior to its will. 
There has been a shift from responder to instigator, and the child’s options have 
expanded. We are viewing in sharp profile the acquisition of agency. 

The Animal Voices Game

This game is also familiar to most of us in the United States and probably is played 
in many other places as well. It consists of a question/response sequence geared 
to connecting an animal voice, as culturally coded, to the name of the appropriate 
species. The game can be played in two orders, either by giving the name of the 
species and inquiring what it “says,” or by giving the voicing of the species and 
asking for the species label. Here is a sample pair:

1
“What does the cow say?”
“Moo.”

2
“Who says (goes) ‘Moo’”?
“A (the) cow.”

This game is typically played with the familiar animals from the barnyard and 
home — cow, cat, dog, horse, pig, etc. These are also the animals most frequently 
encountered in picture books for children, thus providing a link to the naming game 
discussed above. More exotic animals can be introduced to add further interest, 
and as with any other game, this one can be pushed to its limits and beyond 
through the inclusion of fanciful options — the otter, the dinosaur, the unicorn.

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As with the naming game, the animal voices game facilitates pleasing episodes 
of fruitful collaboration between infants and their adult caregivers. In both games, 
a pattern of interaction is specified and complementary roles are defined. A further 
continuity between the two games is the focus upon isolating and identifying 
significant phenomena in the child’s world. And, in the voicing game’s second order, 
the child is once again called upon to supply the needed label in response to a 
stimulus, in this instance not the visual representation of the object but its cultural-
coded voicing. The naming game offers the delight of visual images contained in 
books; the voicing game has no such need of props and offers the special 
pleasures of imitating animal voices and provisionally, taking on their identities. 

So how does the child take possession of this second routine? A first stage, 
obviously, is being able to adequately connect the voice to the animal, and 
to successfully reproduce the animal’s voice. This latter achievement is often 
accomplished with some verve, affording the child a space for artistic elaboration. 
In this stage, the child acquires the knowledge to respond in culturally appropriate 
ways; we are seeing the transfer of cultural (and verbal) competence from adult to 
child. But two additional stages lie ahead and these will launch the child into an 
expanded zone of personal agency. 

The second stage emerges when the child learns to initiate the animal voices 
game, shifting the original stipulation of roles as we saw with the naming game. 
The child initiates a round of animal voices, now selecting which of the orders 
to employ and selecting as well the sequence of animals to deploy. The child’s 
range of options has increased, and the choices made in this expanded zone of 
operation carry a sense of this particular child’s take on the process: the child 
has acquired space to develop and project a unique sense of self. I propose that 
a third stage emerges when the child attains sufficient mastery over the game to 
introduce fanciful choices — like the otter, dinosaur, or unicorn — or to subvert 
the integrity of the game by supplying, deliberately, the wrong voicing or species 
label. This third stage features a striking degree of agency — not only has the 
child seized the initiative in the turn-taking arena and exerted a peremptory 
control over the game’s sequence, but it now pretends to drive the game to 
hilarious wreckage by violating the game’s basic constitution, which depends upon 
a constant and predictable set of linkages between voicings and species labels. 

In both of these games, the naming game and the animal voices game, what 
begins as a coordinated interaction steered by adult initiative gradually transforms 
into a child-initiated routine that follows the stipulated rules of play or, in the 
perversion of the voicing game, subverts these rules. The child’s scope for 
asserting agency is at first restricted to mastering its allotted role and performing 
effectively in that role. But as time elapses and the child becomes more familiar 
with these games, the scope for asserting agency is greatly expanded to the point 
where the child becomes the master of the game and its adult interlocutor fills a 
reduced role as respondent to the child’s prodding. In the next sections, we will 
observe a similar dynamic and conceptual arena but now in the setting of child-
to-child discourse, as the child carries these same interests and energies into its 
juvenile play group, with riddling as the chosen game.

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Naming and Describing

John Lyons (1977, 225) notes that “the distinction between referring to an 
individual by name and referring to the same individual by means of a descriptive 
noun-phrase is something that the child only gradually acquires.” We have seen a 
progression from mere naming to evoking through voice in the transition from the 
naming game to the animal voices game. But imitation of voices does not require 
the verbal equipment that producing descriptive noun-phrases does. As the child 
enters more deeply into the referencing project, referencing through descriptive 
language becomes a central quest in the process of acquiring language. Continuing 
the theme of this paper, I want to show how involvement in playful activities, 
and indeed, how a renewed commitment to interrogative routines, enter into the 
expansion of social, verbal, and cognitive capacities, affording the pre-school, 
kindergarten, and primary-school child additional vehicles for the realization and 
expression of self.

As adults we take for granted describing an object or event as a strategy of 
evocation that works in tandem with naming. But this skill, like so many others 
going into the basics of conversing and socializing, must be learned and practiced 
in the apprenticeship phase as children observe and begin to reproduce the verbal 
moves in their social environments. Catherine Garvey (1984, 69) tells us that young 
children have difficulty producing adequate descriptions when “it is necessary 
to use a referring expression that unambiguously selects a referent from among 
others that differ from it on one or more dimensions of attributes.” Evocation 
through description is no easy task; the ideal description will locate some unique 
feature of the intended referent, and one that will register with the interlocutor. 

The skills that go into describing expand upon the skills that go into naming. 
Once a range of objects, events, and persons can be effectively named, a 
supporting vocabulary of descriptive terms and phrases must be perfected so 
that precise reference can be accomplished. It is one of the miracles of human 
language that objects not present and even fanciful objects can be named, 
referenced, and brought into focus. Children master this magic in significant 
degree through the playful activities discussed in this paper. I want to turn 
now to the challenges to be met in forging effective descriptions, and explore, 
in particular, how these challenges are addressed in the interrogative routines 
known as riddling. We leave behind, for the most part, the realm of adult-child 
communication, since riddling is mostly practiced, in the contemporary United 
States at least, in peer-group settings. We shall discover in this batch of material 
a progression familiar from the two games already considered, from a phase of 
mastery to a phase of subversion, as children in the primary-school years graduate 
from descriptive routines to true riddles.

Riddling Games

Successful describing depends upon the ability to frame what John Searle (1969, 
86) calls “the unique identifying description,” a verbal proposition or set of 

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propositions that sets the intended referent apart from all other possible referents. 
John Lyons (1977, 180) views this ability in terms of the “referencing expression” 
that allows the hearer “to pick out the actual referent from the class of potential 
referents.” In the early stages of riddling, as early as the fourth year of life, children 
build verbal exchanges ideally suited to testing and confirming appropriate 
describing strategies. These riddling initiates imitate the riddle technique, with 
its question-answer sequence, before they have mastered the subtleties of what 
folklorists know as the block element, that piece of deception at the heart of the 
true riddle. 

Brian Sutton-Smith (1972) writes about the pre-riddle, which he defines as a 
puzzling question with an arbitrary answer, as one way to enter the riddling game 
before its logic is fully understood. I have written about what I call the descriptive 
routine (McDowell 1979), which offers another solution to this problem — in 
the descriptive routine, the child presents a transparent description in hopes 
of eliciting the name of the described object. The descriptive routine manifests 
as a joint exercise in the evocation of absent referents through their identifying 
descriptions. As younger children seek to enter the riddling arena, and as their 
slightly older peers seek to sustain a flagging session, riddles of transparent 
description make their appearance. Like Sutton-Smith’s pre-riddle, descriptive 
routines allow initiates to secure a space in the performance protocol — their 
productions pass as tokens of the game — even if these formulations fail to 
include the special conceptual twist of the genre.

But to characterize descriptive routines as flawed tokens of the genre is to miss 
their positive contributions to the child’s developing mastery over the social and 
cognitive skills entailed in their construction. I prefer to see them as a legitimate 
forum of verbal intrigue, slanted toward the straightforward reproduction of 
cultural knowledge, as was the case with the child’s initial encounters with the 
naming game and the animal voices game. When children produce descriptive 
routines, they are engaged in a search for proper descriptive strategies. The proof 
of success in this endeavor is the capacity to call to mind the name of an object 
simply by describing it. For children at this stage of development, this outcome is 
remarkable and rewarding in itself. 

There are multiple techniques used by children in producing descriptive 
riddles. I will draw upon field data I gathered in the mid 1970s among Mexican 
American kids in Austin, Texas, to illustrate some of these options. One is to 
describe through reference to the object’s salient physical properties. Consider the 
following cluster:

What’s red? A rose.
What has five sides and lives in the sea? A starfish.
What’s square and it gots a point on the top? A house.
What gots a lot of colors when it rains? A rainbow.
It’s in a circle, gots little sticks, and they got something planted?  
A tree.

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As generally is done in riddling, one child enunciates the query and then leaves 
an interlude for the other child or children to announce the solution. If the 
respondents are not forthcoming with the solution, the child who began the 
routines provides it. 

Three features immediately are striking as we contemplate this cluster of 
descriptive riddles. First, it is clear that these opening queries are spontaneously 
formulated. One advantage of this style of riddling for the neophyte is this ready-
to-hand quality of the material — there is no requirement to carefully keep in 
mind a complicated ploy, as in true riddles. Second, these quick formulations seize 
on the basic perceptual categories such as color, form, extension, and so forth. 
They foster the perfection of an objective lexicon that can be applied across the 
spectrum of experience. These routines exhibit a strong empirical orientation to 
the world. And third, there are degrees of acuity evident in these descriptions both 
with regards to amount of detail and clarity. The first example can be seen as too 
broad in its descriptor, since any number of objects possess redness; the next item, 
describing the starfish, comes much closer to the desired quality of uniqueness in 
the descriptor. 

The quest for clear articulation in identifying descriptions is evident in the 
following exchange, where an older child improves upon the query of a younger 
peer:

— Oh, what’s red and white,
red and white and doesn’t do nothing,
and has a stick down its side,
and the red and white thing is against the stick?
— I don’t know.
— Flag.
— To a pole, 
red, white, and blue, stuck on to a big pole.

Here the younger child inadvertently produces something closer to a true riddle, 
by concealing the intended referent of his description, a riddling tactic akin to 
what Roger Abrahams (1972) refers to as “the scrambled gestalt.” The older child 
creates a better description by eliminating the excess verbiage, replacing the word 
“stick” with the more appropriate “pole,” and adding the missing element “blue.”

Ironic Descriptions

As in the naming game and the animal voices game, the riddling game opens into 
a sophisticated twist on basic procedures as children gain mastery over technique; 
but in riddling, this additional twist is required in order to reproduce satisfactory 
examples of the genre. The riddle proper, unlike the puzzling pre-riddle or the 
empirical descriptive routine, pivots on the block element, that kernel of linguistic 
or conceptual sleight of hand that is deliberately introduced to temporarily 
separate the query from its solution. The riddle appears to be a venture much like 
the naming game or the animal voices game, in which an identifying description 

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launches a search for an intended referent. But right off there is something odd 
about these descriptions. Perhaps they contain a contradiction in terms, as in this 
example:

What has eyes but cannot see?  

This is a problematic description because it appears to challenge its own grounds 
of plausibility; Robert Georges and Alan Dundes (1963) term this strategy 
“privational.” 

Other riddle queries are not inherently contradictory but instead lead to a state 
of semantic indeterminacy:

What has four wheels and flies?

A thousand lights in a dish, what is it?

These descriptions do not readily evoke their intended referents. In fact, to solve 
such riddles the child must set aside the apparent drift of the description in order 
to locate the intended referent. This technique is present in the most famous riddle 
in the English language tradition:

What’s black and white and red all over?

In order to hit on “a newspaper,” the child must resist the sequence of color terms 
to hear “read” rather than “red.” 

Riddles like these, the true riddles of riddling, offer a furtive act of description 
in the guise of an obvious one. Their identifying descriptions are deliberately 
skewed to the opaque, to odd semantic nuances and fortuitous homophonic 
equivalences. They qualify as extensions of the naming game, but the quest here 
is for illicit rather than sanctioned modes of description. Children in their seventh 
and eighth years of age specialize in these excursions into a shifty world of verbal 
intrigue. The descriptions in true riddles add word play, metaphor, and anomaly 
to the child’s bag of tricks. They accomplish the magic of actually describing while 
appearing not to describe. 

Riddling at this level amounts to a deconstruction of the act of referencing, 
revealing that naming systems are only approximate and tentative. Riddles built on 
word play, like this one,

What has four wheels and flies? A garbage truck

point to limitations in the verbal code, its often duplicitous matching of sound and 
sense and its sometimes ambiguous structures of logic. Such riddles exploit these 
wrinkles in the code to produce descriptions with a curious semantics; they invite 
awareness of the arbitrary and conventional status of natural languages, of their 
incompleteness and imperfection, their relativity.

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Riddles based on metaphoric connections assess another sort of code limitation, 
the poverty of conventional systems of thought in comparison to the wealth of 
sensory experience. Let’s return to one of my favorite children’s riddles:

A thousand lights in a dish, what is it? The stars in the night sky.

Riddles like this one propose innovative arrangements of objects in our fields 
of experience based on the use of valid but unorthodox criteria. They reveal 
that conventional forms of classification, acquired with such persistence by the 
younger child, are in fact skeletal. These riddles momentarily bring into focus 
alternative visions of the cosmic order — the set of concave objects (dishes, the 
night panorama) and the set of points of light (stars, lights in a dish). The child 
correctly concludes that these phantom conceptual regimes are less pragmatic than 
the conventional ones, but it delights in highlighting their impeccable if impractical 
logics.

Finally, riddles based on anomaly contribute their special flair to children’s 
riddling. 

How many balls of string would it take to reach the moon?  
One big one.

What do kangaroos have that nobody else has? Baby kangaroos.

What is taller sitting than standing? A dog.

Here we have neither word play nor fresh comparison. Instead, these riddles find 
their block element in real-world observations that run counter to our conventional 
patterns of thought. Their message, it seems, is that the world of experience is far 
more replete than our systems for classifying and codifying it can ever be.

Conclusion

In her AFS paper presented in Québec City, 2007, Katharine Schramm 
looks closely at what she calls “nascent folklore,” which she positions as 
early manifestations of Laurie McGonnagill’s “protolore,” the first stirrings of 
conventionalized artistic expression among preschoolers (McGonnagill 1993). 
Schramm’s infants are in the preverbal stage, for the most part, yet their gurgles 
and coos, facial expressions, squirms, and wiggles indicate that they are already 
tuned into communicative networks and anxious to assert themselves as players 
in these arenas. What I have tried to do here is sketch out lines of continuity 
between the expressive profiles described by McGonnagill and Schramm and 
the robust activation of creative energies that we celebrate as children’s folklore 
(McDowell 1995). I have no doubt that we can systematically trace this progression 
in artistic competence, and I offer this paper as an initial stab at marking out a 
consolidation of agency and expertise in one specific zone of communicative 
competence.

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The concern here has been to construct a longitudinal portrait of the young 
person’s indoctrination into the naming and referencing of things. Naming and 
referencing are undoubtedly crucial pieces in the acquisition of basic cultural 
competence, so they offer an important arena for observing how children gain 
mastery over materials and instruments of their culture. We have concerned 
ourselves with playful activities centered on naming — the naming game, the 
animal voices game, and riddling games. Play, it appears, is a vital forum in the 
process of learning how to be a person in a society. These playful activities in 
one phase are places where children can absorb, try out, and perfect the naming 
and referencing practices of their communities. In another, subsequent phase, 
the newly-mastered maneuvers can be inspected for subversive potential — the 
possibility of odd animal voices, or of unconventional modes of description.

Becoming a person in society entails developing a sense of self, and these 
naming games provide opportunities for expressing the genius of self, from 
the toddler phase into early adolescence. One step is seizing control over an 
interactive routine; another is directing the game to the child’s preferred style 
and content; a third is using the game to challenge received structures of cultural 
coding. I hope to have demonstrated in this paper that children’s play with naming 
and referencing is a wonderful arena to observe the acquisition of culture and the 
realization of self. I propose, in conclusion, that this play is more than that — that 
it is, as well, an essential zone of personal engagement and growth.

WORKS CITED

Abrahams, Roger D. 1968. Introductory Remarks Toward a Rhetorical Theory of 
Folklore. Journal of American Folklore 81: 143-58. 

Dissanayake, Ellen. 2001. Becoming Homo Aestheticus: Sources of Aesthetic 
Imagination in Mother-Infant Interactions. SubStance 30: 85-103.

Garvey, Catherine. 1984. Children’s Talk. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Georges, Robert and Alan Dundes. 1963. Toward a Structural Definition of the 

Riddle. Journal of American Folklore 76: 111-18.
Lyons, John. 1977. Semantics, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  
McDowell, John H. 1979. Children’s Riddling. Bloomington: Indiana University 

Press.
______. 1995. The Transmission of Children’s Folklore. In Children’s Folklore: A 

Source Book, ed. 
Brian Sutton-Smith, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon, 

49-62. New York: Garland.
McGonnagill, Laurie. 1993. Preschool Protolore. Children’s Folklore Review 16(7): 

41-47.
Meltzoff, Andrew. 2007. “Like Me”: A Foundation for Social Cognition. 

Developmental Science 10: 126-34.
Schramm, Katherine. 2007. Nascent Folklore: Infant Communication and 

Aesthetics. Paper read at the annual meeting of the American Folklore 
Society, Québec City, Canada.

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Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. 
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sutton-Smith, Brian, Jay Mechling, Thomas W. Johnson, and Felicia R. McMahon, 
eds. 1995. Children’s Folklore: A Source Book. New York: Garland.

______. 1976. A Developmental Structural Account of Riddles. In Speech Play: 
Research and Resources for the Study of Linguistic Creativity, ed. Mary 
Sanches and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 11-119. Philadelphia: University 
of Pennsylvania Press.

 

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