Preschoolers understand and generate pretend actions using object substitution

Abstract

cannot be sure that children's pretense is in fact novel, or whether they simply copy or follows others' instructions. Some experimental work has attempted to capture children's novel pretense (Nielsen & Christie, 2008; Rakoczy, et al., 2004). However, we argue that what looked like novel pretense in these studies could be explained by deferred imitation. This is the first experiment to show preschoolers create their own novel object substitutions, without relying on deferred imitation. Generating Object Substitutions Pretend play differs from functional play as the actions performed during pretend play are technically incorrect (e.g., drinking from empty cup, talking to banana; Hoicka & Gattis, 2008; Hoicka, Jutsum, & Gattis, 2008; Hoicka & Martin, 2016). One form of pretend play, object substitution, requires temporarily suppressing the typical action for the object while performing an action that is typical for another object (e.g., pretending banana is phone; Tomasello, Striano, & Rochat, 1999). Naturalistic research suggests children perform object substitution during free play from 2 years (e.g., Belsky & Most, 1981; McCune-Nicolich, 1981). However, these studies do not provide information on the content of their play. Additionally, it is difficult to determine whether children's object substitutions are generated by children themselves, or whether they are copied from others (immediately after observation, or using deferred 1 imitation; see Hoicka & Akhtar, 2012). 2 Experimental research suggests 2-to 3-year-olds perform object substitutions (e.g.,

Implications of pretend play for Theory of Mind research

“…A further important aspect of early pretence which should be noted is that the pretend play context is often provided to children, which might help them use the pretend representations in the context of pretend play. There is evidence that while children of age 3 are quite good at joining in a pretence initiated by an adult and responding appropriately, they are considerably less good at starting a novel pretence of their own (Bijvoet-van den Berg & Hoicka, 2019). My claim therefore is that children at that age are able to handle inconsistent representations, but only if they have external support when generating and subsequently using these representations.…”

Explaining early generics: A linguistic model

“…Creative and imaginative substitution pretense play in this sense, however, is seen in 3–4‐year‐olds (Bijvoet‐van den Berg & Hoicka, 2019) but possibly not much earlier, entailing that language even in production is well underway by this point. Unlike what is claimed in Csibra and Shamsudheen (2015), moreover, such play does not appear to be a good example of kind‐reference strictly speaking, beyond the fact that a child realizes that predicates identifying given objects can be replaced by others, leaving the object unchanged.…”