YOUNG CHILDRENS UNDERSTANDING OF PRETENSE

Children's understanding of adult pretense was assessed in seven experiments. By the age of 28 months, children are able to understand when an adult refers to a make-believe substance, such as ''tea'' or ''cereal'': they appropriately direct their pretend actions to a prop that ''contains'' the substance (Experiment 1). Similarly, when an adult introduces a make-believe substitution (e.g., treats wooden blocks as bananas), children appropriately extrapolate that substitution to new props (Experiment 2). In acknowledging such make-believe identities, children are flexible: they direct different pretend actions to the same prop depending on the make-believe identity that is conferred on it by the ongoing pretense episode (Experiments 3 and 4). When they watch an adult transform an imaginary substance by ''pouring,'' ''spilling,'' ''squeezing,'' etc., children can also work out the causal consequences. They realize, for example, that imaginary tea has been spilled onto a table or that imaginary toothpaste has been squeezed onto a make-believe banana. They produce a suitable remedial action (Experiment 5) or describe what has happened with appropriate nonliteral language (Experiments 6 and 7). A theoretical model is proposed to explain how children can both construct a coherent mental representation of a pretense episode and use that representation to guide pretend actions and language. The model is compared to other proposed accounts of pretense.