Is young children's recognition of pretense metarepresentational or merely behavioral? Evidence from 2- and 3-year-olds' understanding of pretend sounds and speech.

When young children observe pretend-play, do they interpret it simply as a type of behavior, or do they infer the underlying mental state that gives the behavior meaning? This is a long-standing question with deep implications for how "theory on mind" develops. The two leading accounts of shared pretense give opposing answers. The behavioral theory proposes that children represent pretense as a form of behavior (behaving in a way that would be appropriate if P); the metarepresentational theory argues that children instead represent pretense via the early concept PRETEND. A test between these accounts is provided by children's understanding of pretend sounds and speech. We report the first experiments directly investigating this understanding. In three experiments, 2- and 3-year-olds' listened to requests that were either spoken normally, or with the pretense that a teddy bear was uttering them. To correctly fulfill the requests, children had to represent the normal utterance as the experimenter's, and the pretend utterances as the bear's. Children succeeded at both ages, suggesting that they can represent pretend speech (the requests) as coming from counterfactual sources (the bear rather than the experimenter). We argue that this is readily explained by the metarepresentational theory, but harder to explain if children are behaviorists about pretense.

Preschoolers infer ownership from "control of permission".

Owners control permission-they forbid and permit others to use their property. So it is reasonable to assume that someone controlling permission over an object is its owner. The authors tested whether preschoolers infer ownership in this way. In the first experiment, 4- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, chose as owner of an object a character who granted or denied another character permission to use it. In Experiment 2, older 3-year-olds chose as owner of an object a character who prevented another character from using it when prevention was accomplished by controlling permission but not otherwise. Younger 3-year-olds chose between the characters at chance. These findings indicate that preschoolers infer ownership from control of permission.