Solitary and collaborative pretense play in early childhood: sources of individual variation in the development of representational competence.

This study evaluates sources of individual variation in child pretense play as an expression of emerging mental representation. Family sociodemographic characteristics, maternal personological characteristics, and maternal affective and cognitive play behaviors, as well as children's gender, language competence, and play, were examined simultaneously. Naturalistic child solitary play and child collaborative play with mother were videorecorded in 141 20-month-olds. Child solitary play, child-initiated and mother-initiated collaborative play with mother, and maternal demonstrations and solicitations of play were then coded into nonsymbolic and symbolic acts. Zero-order relations obtained between child play and, respectively, child gender and language, family SES, and maternal verbal intelligence, personality, physical affection, and play demonstrations and solicitations. Structural equation modeling supported the following unique predictive relations: Child language and mothers' symbolic play positively influenced child collaborative play, and child gender and mothers' verbal intelligence predicted child solitary play. Child gender and mothers' verbal intelligence and physical affection influenced mothers' play and so influenced child collaborative play indirectly. The cognitive advantages of child play and maternal influences on child play are placed in an adaptive parenting framework.

Using representations: comprehension and production of actions with imagined objects.

Previous research suggests that young children have difficulty producing actions with imagined objects (pantomimes): They frequently substitute a body part to represent the object involved in the action. This response has also been observed in neurologically impaired adults. Study 1 examined the comprehension and production of pantomimes in 3- and 5-year-old children and normal adults to explore further this aspect of representational ability. Results indicate that young children not only have difficulty producing imaginary object representations in contrast to normal adults, they also have difficulty comprehending imaginary object representations and are better at comprehending pantomimes with a body part representation. The results from the pantomime comprehension task were replicated in Study 2 with 3- and 4-year-olds. These findings are discussed in the context of the development of representational ability as children demonstrate increasing independence from concrete environmental support in their knowledge about actions.

Children's inductive inferences within superordinate categories: the role of language and category structure.

One important function of categories is to allow inferences that extend beyond surface appearances. In 2 studies, preschool and second-grade children were tested on their understanding that members of a category have similar internal parts. In 1 study, children were taught new information about the internal structure of various objects (e.g., an apple), then were probed to determine how far they generalized the new information (e.g., to another apple, to other fruit, to an unrelated object). In a second study, children participated in an open-ended interview that probed whether various types of objects had "the same kinds of stuff inside." Children at both ages and in both studies drew many inferences concerning the internal children to report that members of a basic-level category had the same internal parts. Older children drew more inferences at the superordinate level than did younger children. Older children were also more sensitive to differences in category domain (natural kind vs. artifact) at both basic and superordinate levels. Altogether, these results suggest that preschool children assume that basic-level categories share internal parts. They need to refine this belief at the basic level and to extend it to superordinate-level categories.