“…Historically, this has been a highly controversial issue (Antinucci & Miller, 1976;Bronckart & Sinclair, 1973;Weist, 1989Weist, , 2014, and it is beyond the scope of this paper to summarize the developmental psycholinguistics debate. Detailed analyses suggest that children's first uses of the past tense (Sachs, 1983;Shirai & Miyata, 2006) are to the immediate rather than the remote past, consistent with the idea that very young children's first use of the past tense is to mark something about the nature of the events themselves (i.e., that they are completed).2 In suggesting this, we are not claiming that these very young children cannot represent anything except the here-and-now. We are assuming that young children have the sort of representational capacities widely attributed to them in the post-Piagetian era of cognitive developmental psychology, as demonstrated, e.g., by studies of deferred imitation of event sequences (Bauer & Wewerka, 1995;Bauer et al, 1994;Meltzoff, 1995) or by the fact that children of this age will refer to absent objects or people (Sachs, 1983).…”