j garfield lets pretend

7/31/2019 j Garfield Lets Pretend

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Lets Pretend:

How Pretence Scaffolds the Acquisition of Theory of Mind

Jay L Garfield, Smith College

University of MelbourneCentral Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies

Candida Peterson, The University of Queensland

Rachel Brown, Smith College

Jessie Fredlund, Smith College

Kate Mead, Smith College

Ariadne Nevin, Smith College

Tricia Perry, Smith College

Blaine Garson, Mudpies Artisans Cooperative

ROUGH DRAFT: DO NOT QUOTE

ABSTRACT

De Villiers and de Villiers (2000) propose that the acquisition of the syntactic

device of sentential complementation is a necessary condition for the acquisition oftheory of mind (ToM). It might be argued that ToM mastery is simply a

consequence of grammatical development. On the other hand, there is also good

evidence (Garfield, Peterson & Perry 2001) that social learning is involved in ToM

acquisition. We investigate the connection between linguistic and social-cognitivedevelopment, arguing that pretence is crucially involved in the acquisition ofToM.

We demonstrate that successful understanding of pretence discourse, including the

syntactic and semantic properties of sentential complements in the context of verbsof pretence, develops well before ToM as measured by standard tests of false belief

understanding. We argue that pretence plays a crucial role in cognitive

development, allowing children to gain familiarity with mental representations thatfail to accord with reality, and allowing them to learn the syntax and semantics of

verbs taking sentential complements, thus enabling conversational exchange

involving embedded complement clauses and the acquisition ofToM. We alsodemonstrate that the developmental track of pretence and ToM allows us to see

how social, conceptual and linguistic development work together to scaffold thedevelopment of the understanding of mind. We conclude that childrens earlyinvolvement in pretend play and conversation paves the way both for their

subsequent development of a ToM-based understanding of the mind as a guiding

network of propositional attitudes, and for their further development of syntactic

competence with complementation for doxastic and epistemic verbs.

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1. Introduction: Three Puzzles about Pretence

In all human cultures, typical children engage in a great deal of pretend play, usually

beginning between the ages of one and two years (Dunn and Dale 1984, Piaget, 1962).

This presents something of a paradox. Given that youngHomo sapiens have so much to

learn about the concrete physical world and so many realthings to which to attend, this

strikingly universal early tendency to set aside reality in favor of the imaginary demands an

explanation. Simple evolutionary considerations suggest that if this behaviour were so

counterproductive that it interfered with social and intellectual development, it would be

selected against. Such considerations also suggest that, given its ubiquity and the sheer

amount of time children devote to it, pretending must have some real advantage. But what

is that advantage? (Leslie (1987), as we shall see, also raises this question, as does Harris

(2001).)

Arnott (2001) argues on psychoanalytic grounds that pretence has the

developmental advantages of providing children both with a sense of control, enabling

them to fantasize power they do not in fact have, and with an emotional outlet, allowing

them to express and to expunge themselves of emotions that might be unacceptable or

dangerous in real interactions. Another long-established view of the value of play is as an

opportunity to rehearse for adult life and a way to learn social skills. These explanations

are fairly commonly echoed in clinical literature, despite little or no empirical evidence or

even real argument for them. And a bit of reflection suggests that they are tendentious

explanations at best, and in fact, hardly explanatory at all: Children can acquire a sense of

control by manipulating realobjects and by interacting with others regarding real

transformations and events that matter. There is no need for pretence to accomplish this.

Indeed in pretend activities, as opposed to real ones, nothing is really controlled. Why not

suggest that pretence would reinforce feelings of impotence?

Emotions may be expressed in pretend play, but in the absence of an independent

argument for the value of that expression this is no explanation of its value. Misdirected

emotion might in fact be a badthing. The rehearsal explanation is often proffered, but is

specious: How many reading this paper pretended to be academics at age 2? And how do

a two-year-olds approximations of firefighting help that child when she is an adult?

Draft of 6/10/12: Do not quote without permission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 2


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Pretence is generally social, and indeed facilitates the development of social skills, but

many non-pretence activities accomplish this as well, and there is no reason to think that

pretending is more social than other collaborative games.

Harris (1994) argues that the production and comprehension of pretence is a by-product of our competence at producing and interpreting serious goal directed action. The

execution of such actions is regulated by planning and goal-seeking; the actions are not

normally controlled by the availability or visibility of the props that might be incorporated

into the action sequence. (p. 256) On this account, our innate ability to represent the non-

existent when we plan enables us to represent the non-existent in pretence. Maybe so. But

this hardly explains the phenomenon. For one thing, the use of props, rather than being

rare, as Harris account would predict, is ubiquitous in childrens pretence, and indeed is

taken by some (Lillard 1994) as indicating that pretence is in fact highly stimulus-bound.

But more importantly, at best Harris explains why young children are able to pretend, not

why they actually do it, let alone why alltypically developing children do it. The best way

to practice serious goal-directed behaviour would be to dojust that, not to pretend to

engage in what is often completely unrelated behaviour (such as being a superhero).

More recently Harris (2001) writes, My own resolution of the puzzle of pretend

play is to argue that in various cognitive endeavours, there is no immediate and direct

premium on the maintenance of veridicality There are several contexts in which a

narrowly veridical representation of what ordinarily happens, or has actually happened, is

restrictive or inadequate. (p. 250) Harris argues that counterfactual and syllogistic

reasoning and discourse comprehension are such cases. Now there are some respects in

which the explanation for pretence we shall propose will be consonant with Harris general

intuition: We, too, will argue that the role of pretence is to facilitate the understanding of

other kinds of discourse and to facilitate other kinds of reasoning.

But Harris account cant be quite right. Harris argues that an understanding of

pretence is causally necessary for syllogistic and counterfactual reasoning, and for the

construction of discourse models. First we note, and Harris acknowledges, that there are

no unequivocal data indicating a specific temporal relation between the onset of pretence

understanding and any of these capacities. The arguments Harris offers are speculative and




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analogical. He notes that children are able to represent discourse situations and to engage

in syllogistic and counterfactual reasoning as early as three years of age, and that they

engage in such reasoning in pretence situations. These require entertaining unactualised

possibilities. Pretence is the entertainment of unactualised possibilities. So pretence could

be a causal precursor necessary to facilitate these kinds of conversation and cognition.

But there are problems with this argument. Because these capabilities emerge not

afterpretence, but along with it, there is no clear evidence regarding the direction of

dependence or explanation. It may well be that in order to pretend children must learn to

reason syllogistically and counterfactually and to track discourse. Conversation may assist

this and may, at some level, be a prelude to sharing the representational world of playmate

in pretence. Such socially scaffolded sharing may then lead to improved solitary play and

cognitive understanding of imagination. As Harris (2005) more recently proposes, there are

several different ways that conversation and pretending could relate together as beneficial

influences on ToM development. They could be causally and consequentially related to

one another, as discussed above, or they could be additive, with each serving separately to

promote rapid ToM mastery. Still another possibility is that they might be complementary

to one another so that to achieve the same increment in mental state understanding greater

conversational input may be needed for children with limited role-taking ability (p. 80) or

limited social involvement in scaffolded pretend play.

There is another difficulty with Harris explanation. If pretence were a necessary

condition of the acquisition of the ability to engage in syllogistic and counterfactual

reasoning, we would expect that all of those with a deficit in pretence also exhibit deficits

in these abilities. But high-functioning autistic children, despite the failure to engage in

pretend play, are deficient neither in syllogistic nor in counterfactual reasoning.

Here is a second puzzle: Autistic children often fail to engage in pretend play

(Baron-Cohen 1987, Harris and Leevers 2000) Indeed this is one of the three principal

diagnostic criteria for autism (Frith 1989). Many ToM researchers (Cichetti, Beeghly and

Weis-Perry 1994, Jarrold, Smith, Boucher and Harris 1994, Carruthers 1996, Leslie 1987,

1994) suggest that autistic children fail to engage in pretend play because they lackToM.

The argument goes like this: Pretending is onlyfun if you are aware that you are




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entertaining mental representations that fail to accord with reality. But thatin turn requires

that you are aware that you are entertaining mental representations, and if you lack a ToM

you are not capable of such introspective awareness. There is independent evidence (Frith

and Happ 1999) that autistic individuals lack introspective awareness of their own mental

states. So, pretence would be no fun for autistic children. Therefore, they fail to engage in

what would be a pointless activity.

Though this explanation has a superficial ring of plausibility there are at least two

major errors in reasoning: First, it is not at all clear that the enjoyment of pretence requires

introspective metarepresentation. The direct objects of pretence representation are

typically external objects and persons, and they are simply represented as being other than

they are. That could be fun even if one were not also aware that one was engaging in a

representational activity. (See also Currie 1998, Jarrold, Smith, Boucher and Harris 1994

and Nichols and Stich 2000 as well as Harris 2001.) This leads to the bigger problem:

Pretence behaviour has its onset before two years of age, and there is evidence that

understanding of pretence discourse is firmly in place before three years of age (Custer

1996, Harris 1994, Kavanaugh and Harris 1994). But ToM competence, including the

ability to self-report belief states, does not typically come on line until age four or five. So

at the time when typically developing children are engaging in pretend play and autistic

children are not, children in neithergroup have the introspective awareness that this model

presupposes makes pretence fun. So, at least for now, this puzzle, too, remains unresolved.

We will only sketch the third puzzle at this point, and it will receive a more

thorough treatment below. De Villiers and de Villiers (2000), de Villiers, de Villiers

Schick and Hoffmeister (2000) and de Villiers (2002) argue both that the development of

competence in sentential complementation with verbs of speech and cognition is a

necessary condition for the acquisition ofToM competence and that the development of

this syntactic-semantic competence predicts the imminent onset of subsequent ToM

competence as measured by standard false belief tests. But their theory (deVilliers, 2005)

specifies that only doxastic verbs and verbs of speech serve this function, not verbs of

imagination (dream, imagine, etc.) or pretending (pretend, play that, make

believe). Natural language data, however, suggest that while children do not

spontaneously display competence with the syntactic and semantic properties of




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believes, knows, thinks, and similar epistemic verbs until age 3.5 years or later

(Wellman & Bartsch, 1994), children who are much younger than this engage in social

pretend play, displaying comprehension and use of the verb pretend (or a synonym) and

of parallel syntactic constructions involving acts of imaginary or pretend play (Harris,

2005; Hughes & Dunn, 1997). Does this imply semantic and syntactic mastery of

pretend precedes mastery of believes, and if so, what does the lag mean?

In what follows, we will try to solve these three puzzles and indicate their relation

to each other, thus extending the theoretical framework presented in Garfield, Peterson and

Perry (2001). First we will review a few of the salient features of that framework, though

without further defence here. We will then briefly survey the evidence regarding the

development of the understanding of pretence in normally developing and in autistic

children and the development of sentential complementation in English. This will set the

stage for a consideration of de Villiers and de Villiers hypothesis regarding the role of

complementation in the development ofToM.

We then present two experimental studies. The first demonstrates that children

learn the syntactic and semantic properties of verbs of pretence early, before they learn

enough about verbs of belief to pass standard false belief tests. This suggests both that the

acquisition of complementation is lexicalized, or specific to certain verb forms, and also

that it is driven by non-linguistic development, such as shared participation in pretend play.

This initial study also suggests that the development of syntactic skill with verbs of

pretence is in place before children can understand pretence as a reality-discrepant

representational state and that such a mentalistic understanding of pretence develops well

before children can pass standard false belief tests ofToM. These apparentsequences

provide additional evidence for our view that pretence scaffolds the development ofToM.

Lillard (2001, 2003), however, suggests an alternative view. She argues that a

genuine conceptual understanding of pretence as mentalistic and representational requires,

and belatedly follows, a much earlier understanding of false belief that heralds ToM. In

fact using her Moe paradigm (involving stories about a troll who pantomimes the actions

of animals he has never seen) she provides evidence that children do not understand

pretence until age 7 years or later (Richert & Lillard, 2002), many years after they have




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already acquired the false belief understanding that is generally equated with ToM.

We discuss these arguments in the context of our second empirical study, results of

which help us to explain the tension between our earlier findings and Lillards, as well as

providing more detail regarding the developmental track of typical preschoolersunderstanding of pretend actions, pretence discourse and ToM. Results of the second study

suggest that whereas mastery of the grammar of pretence verbs and the fundamental

conceptual structure of pretence precedes the acquisition ofToM, a fullunderstanding of

the role of knowledge of pretence, along with the ability to reason about the epistemic

status of insiders and outsiders with respect to pretence, follows ToM success on false

belief tests. Lillards tasks require these additional ToM-dependent conceptualizations,

explaining her conclusions regarding the very late emergence of the understanding of

pretence, as she defines it.

We conclude by proposing that the principal functionw of pretence are to give

children experience manipulating, and reasoning about representations that are discordant

with reality in a social context, and to help them learn to use and to understand

complementising constructions and their grammatical properties in speech and in thought.

These capacities enable the acquisition ofToM.

2. Our Theoretical FrameworkAn Overview

In Garfield, Peterson and Perry (2001) we argue that the ToM competence that gives rise to

success on false belief tests depends on the more basic development of two initially

independent cognitive modules --a language processing module and a social intelligence

module. While language and social intelligence may plausibly, on present evidence either

be innate or be acquired through social and cultural experience (like the reading module),

congenital or experiential deficits in either of them can inhibit the development ofToM.

ToM itself, we have argued, is best seen as subserved not by an independently

determined module driven by an innate developmental process, but rather as an assembled

module constructed as a consequence of the interaction of these two modules in a normal

social environment. Its modularity, we argue, is weak, in that it is neither innately




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determined nor encapsulated, despite the fact that the processing it subserves is fast,

mandatory and domain-specific. This account locates us nearby in theoretical space to

Karmiloff-Smith (1992), who emphasises the possibility of modularisation through

representational redescription. This emphasis on modularisation involves a commitment to

an account of cognitive development according to which developmental processes are

mediated by social interaction. In Garfield, Peterson and Perry (2001) we draw upon

empirical evidence for this picture from typically developing preschoolers (Dunn, 1996;

Peterson, 2000) as well as evidence from children with atypical development owing to

conditions like autism, deafness and blindness to argue for the relevance of language,

conversation and social interaction forToM. (Peterson, 2004; Peterson and Siegal, 2000)

Our model draws inspiration from two Vygotskyan principles: First, we agree with

Vygotsky (1978) that language develops initially as a social co-ordination device and is

internalised as a medium of thought only after its public mastery. Second, we agree with

Vygotsky (1962) that the mastery of any cognitive skill involves the transition through

what Vygotsky called a zone of proximal development. In the zone of proximal

development, the child progressively masters a skill through in collaboration with others,

while using social supports, discourse and prompts. Once the child exits this zone of

proximal development the child is able to perform independently. To use Vygotskys

slogan, The child can do alone tomorrow what he can do with others today

We argue that the development ofToM competence exemplifies this pattern. That

is, the ability to represent the falsity of representations and to use attributions of false

representations in the explanation and prediction of behaviour should be mastered

independently only after some social, collaborative practice attributing and using

representations that are discordant with reality. Moreover, to the extent that attribution of

false mental states requires language, including the lexical mastery of an epistemic

vocabulary and the syntactic mastery of sentential complementation devices and their

complex semantic and syntactic properties, these linguistic skills, too, must first be

practised in joint endeavours. The big questions, then, for anyone who wants to cash the

promissory note we issue in (2001) are these: How? What is that zone of proximal

development and what is the character of the relevant joint activity that guides the child to

an eventual private grasp of mindreading? What is the relation of these social exchanges to




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the final ToM competence to be achieved? By now you may be guessing the answer we

will provide, which will also turn out to solve the puzzles we posed in the previous section.

3. Normal Development of Pretence Understanding and Pretence Deficits in

Autism

We follow Lillard (1994) (though with some minor modifications) in defining pretence as

requiring six features: (1) a pretender (or a group of pretenders); (2) a real situation against

which a symbolically represented situationthe pretend situationis contrasted; (3) a

situation in which reality is represented for the purposes of the pretence as other than it is,

but with the knowledge this representation does not alter the actual features of the real

situation; (4) deliberate, voluntary representation on the part of the pretender, unlike, say a

hallucination or delusion; (5) co-existence of the pretend representation with its real

analogue; and (6) self-awareness on the part of the pretender who knows s/he is pretending

and likewise knows what reality consists of. In addition to these features, we will be

interested not only in the development of the ability to pretend but also the more

sophisticated ability to talk about pretence using appropriate syntax and with an awareness

of the nature of the activity and of the properties of the representations it exploits.

Lillard (1994) argues that while three year olds can distinguish between real andpretend objects, even four year olds understanding of the nature of the activity of pretence

is not well-developed, and that they usually conceive of pretence as consisting simply of

miming behaviour, as opposed to being aware of the pretenders accompanying mental

states. These mental states may include deliberate intention to represent the pretend object

and knowledge of the symbolic character and mental locus of the imaginary ideas

underlying the pretence. On this view, Lillard has provided empirical evidence to show

that an understanding of pretence is not generally acquired by typical children until several

years after those children masterToM at age 5. For example, in one of her studies (Richert

& Lillard, 2002) more than one-third of a group of typically developing 7-year-olds

continued to fail Lillards Moe test of pretence understanding. We will be examining

Lillards (1994) account in more detail below, and will take issue with her characterisation

of the cognitive prerequisites for pretence understanding and of this developmental




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sequence. We will argue that her methodology precludes the independent assessment of

ToM mastery and understanding of pretence because her testing procedure confounds

ToM with pretence cognition and requires that children already have ToM concepts like

false belief and knowledge access (Wellman & Liu, 2004) before being able to follow her

test questions.

Leslie (1987, 1994) notes that the development of pretence in typically developing

children follows a fairly regular chronology: children by the end of the second year begin

to engage socially in joint pretend play; shortly afterwards they begin engaging in solitary

pretence. By the age of three, children are often using the verbs of pretence in their

spontaneous speech. Leslie does not investigate, nor does he report any examination of

childrens understanding of the semantic or syntactic properties of these verbs nor any

comparisons of spontaneous speech with standard ToM tests although, of course, it is well

established that typical children do not usually pass false belief tests until after age four.

In our empirical studies described below, we will be concerned specifically with

young childrens understanding of the syntactic and semantic properties of verbs for acts of

imagination or pretending. Previous evidence suggests a special role for these verbs in the

conceptual developments that lead up to and pave the way for, ToM. Peterson and

Slaughter (2006) studied the spontaneous narrative speech of a group of late-signing deaf

children from hearing families who were delayed in ToM development (in common with

most severely and profoundly deaf children with hearing parents who learn sign or use

cochlear implants or hearing aids: Peterson, 2004; Peterson & Siegal, 1999, 2000). They

observed that the children used verbs for imaginary cognitive states (like dreaming,

pretend) ahead both of use of verbs for serious cognition (think, know, remember,

etc) and ahead of their development of false belief understanding on ToM tests. Astington

and Jenkins (1995) studied typically developing preschoolers and found that those who

frequently conversed about pretend with their peers to assign pretend roles and negotiate

pretend-real contrasts were more advanced on ToM tests than children the same age who

rarely or never did so. This suggests that children, whether deaf or hearing, who are able to

converse about pretend with appropriate semantic and syntactic grasp of relevant verbs are

also relatively precocious in ToM development and in understanding false beliefs.




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Arguing from the position that ToM development is innate and purely the

consequence of maturation on a pre-programmed neurological module for mindreading,

Leslie (1987) likewise sees pretence as having a special role in the story ofToM

acquisition. He writes:

It is hard to see how perceptual evidence could ever force an adult, let alone a young child, toinvent the idea of unobservable mental states. Nor is it clear how language learning could lead to

such a concept, because the meaning of relevant linguistic expressions could not be grasped

without first understanding the concept. But a learning mechanism drawing on the

metarepresentational powers emerging late in infancy could play an important role. For example,

a distinction between primitive informational relations (e.g. pretend, believe) that take decoupling

and those (e.g., see, know) that do not could make a contribution to learning the semantics of the

corresponding natural language terms. The childs task, then, would be to discover how a given

linguistic expression translates into metarepresentational code. Although this problem is far from

trivial, it is less monumental than having to inventing the whole idea of mental states from scratch

as well.

Why does it take the 2-year-old pretender an additional 2 years to understand false belief?

Wimmer and Perner (1983) argued that it was not until 4 years of age that the child could conceive

simultaneously of two contradictory models of reality. But the early emergence of pretence shows

that one must look elsewhere for an explanation.

Even a cursory comparison of pretence and false-belief understanding shows that they differ

markedly in the complexity of the reasoning required. In pretence the [relevant] relations are

essentially just stipulated. In false-belief understanding, the answer must be worked out. (1987,422-423)

By decoupling Leslie means that such verbs as pretend and believe, are non-factive, as opposed to the facticity of know and see. He argues that decoupling in this

sense is at the heart of metarepresentation and hence ofToM. Since pretence requires

decoupling, he argues, ToM must already be in place by age three, in order to explain

young childrens pretence behaviour and discourse. Their failure to pass standard ToM

tasks requiring the representation of false belief, he argues, issues not from an imperfectly

developed representation of mental states or understanding of the semantics of mental state

terms, but rather from a failure to appreciate the characteristic causes of mental states. As a

consequence, he argues, young children believe that the state of the world, and not an

agents perception of it, gives rise directly to belief. (Ibid. 423)

While agreeing that pretend play, pretence understanding and pretence discourse do

precede the growth ofToM mastery on false belief tasks, we take issue with Leslies

theoretical account in other respects. Surely there is no reason to infer from the fact that




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children appreciate the non-facticity of pretend verbs that they fully appreciate their

cognitive representational character. Learning that these verbs do not create factive

contexts is part and parcel of learning their use in a variety of play situations. (Indeed

many of our youngest subjects, despite the fact that they use the verbs of pretence in

conversation, sometimes treat them as factive.) Consider the transition from initiating play

by making the simple statement, Im the king. You are the queen. to use of the verb by

saying, Lets pretend. Im the king and you are the queen. Here all that has been

introduced is a term for an activity. Though the activity might be seen by others to be

representational, children need not think of it in that way.

Now we move to more sophisticated syntax with, Lets pretend that Im the king

and youre the queen. Nothing but syntax has been added. To be sure, this addition may

prove significantthe fact that children are mastering complementation and referentially

opaque syntactic constructions will enable them to learn that they are in fact representing

reality symbolically and this may indeed help to generate for them a more encompassing

concept of representation, one species of which in a few years we will see as belief.

However, the use of an embedded syntactic construction for pretend it need not signify

now that the child has mentally represented representations. We thus suggest that Leslie

has the order of explanation reversed here: It is not because children have ToM that they

are able to pretend, to talk about their pretence, and to assign and negotiate pretend roles

with others. Rather, it is because they learn to pretend, to socially negotiate it and to talk

about it that they are able to acquire ToM.

Leslie (1994) points out that children as young as two years are able to engage in

counterfactual reasoning within pretence scenarios and are able to demonstrate this

reasoning both verbally and in their actions in pretend play (see Kavanaugh & Harris,

1994). Moreover, as Piagets (1962) early accounts show, toddlers as young as 18 months

to 2 years have ample opportunity to observe other peoples pretend play and are able to

accurately infer both that they are pretending what they are pretending about. Leslie argues

that this demonstrates that children this young are already involved in metarepresentation

and so have developed a representational ToM. We have just argued that this reasoning is

fallacious. Leslie notes that autistic children fail to pretend spontaneously and are likely to

fail both on tasks requiring them to characterise others pretence and on false belief tasks.




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He argues that they do so because of deficits in ToM. He hence argues that failure on

false belief tasks for typically developing children must be explained differently from the

corresponding failure of autistic children, and argues that two- and three-year-olds fail false

belief tests ofToM because of the prepotency of true belief attribution and the unusual

processing demands false-belief tasks place on children.

To us, this reasoning has a terribly ad hoc feel about it, and we believe it does not

stand up to a close scrutiny of the tasks in question. For one thing, Leslies model seems to

beg the question. If true beliefis prepotent, why isnt true attribution of reality prepotent

over imagination? That is, why dont reality attributions trump pretend attributions in

pretence? The claim that false belief tasks involve special processing demands is hard to

understand. When false belief tasks are compared with pretend tasks (for instance those in

Custer 1996, Harris 1994; Hickling, Wellman & Gottfried, 1997)) the tasks appear

completely isomorphic. In each case, executive control, linguistic processing and memory

demands are equivalent. Children are required to entertain dual representations so as to

keep track of the way the world actually is and the way it is represented to be. They must

also comprehend questions and draw inferences based upon reality-discrepant

representations of low perceptual salience, using locutions attributing propositional

attitudes. That they do better on these tasks when the false representations are pretences as

opposed to false beliefs, and when the verbs in questions are verbs of pretence as opposed

to doxastic verbs, is the phenomenon that must be explained. Citing obscure processing

demands simply shirks that burden.

Harris (1994) explains the disjuncture between childrens success in pretence

activities and their failure in false belief tasks in the following way: Pretence, he argues,

requires no metarepresentation at all. Instead, he argues, pre-ToM children understand

pretence as a special form of activityone directed at make-believe entities with make-

believe outcomes (p. 251) Since children do not need to represent the fact that they are

representingbut only must be able to represent the non-existent, there is no need forToM

competence in order for them to pretend and to talk about pretence successfully. Custer

(1996) casts some doubt on Harriss interpretation. In her testing procedure, children were

required to attach thought pictures to the heads of figures who were verbally depicted

either as engaged in pretend play or as entertaining a false belief. Even three-year-olds had




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little difficulty with the pretend version of this task yet failed the false belief version. For

example, in one sample, 60 percent of 3-year-olds passed the pretend test while only 28

percent passed the completely parallel form involving false belief and a statistical test

revealed that the difference was significant with success on pretence higher than success on

false belief. Custer concluded that an understanding of pretence as representational

develops before an understanding of belief as representational.

While this conclusion is highly plausible, there were some possible problems with

Custers procedure, which suggest a need for further investigation. For one thing, even

though children could respond to her tasks nonverbally by pointing, her narrative procedure

and questions were highly verbal and complex, so that children with poor language skills

may have failed despite some comprehension of pretending. Specifically, in order to

understand her test stories, children had to understand the epistemic verb knows

mentalistically, and to process embedded complement clauses involving knows that.

Since these skills emerge relatively late in the sequence ofToM acquisition, just before

false belief mastery (Wellman & Liu, 2004), Custers tasks may have underestimated

childrens genuine understanding of pretending. Our studies are therefore designed to

further examine pretence understanding in 3-year-olds, using a procedure that does not

require prerequisite understanding of knowledge, ignorance and conditions of knowledge

access.

The debate between Harris and Custer likewise fails to supply a compelling answer

to the key question of what pretence isforin an evolutionary or teleological developmental

sense. We will argue that pretence is preciselyfor learning to metarepresent. Even though

a child doesnt need to know how to metarepresent to start pretending, he or she soon finds

him/herself talking with playmates using representational language and handling public

representations whose discord with reality demands attention. So by engaging in pretence

and by talking about it children learn both to metarepresent and to engage in

complementised discourse. If this story is correct we can accommodate both Harris and

Custers data and intuitions to some extent. But in taking seriously and in confirming

Custers findings that success with pretence precedes success with false belief and in

demonstrating that this includes an appreciation of the grammatical features of the relevant

verbs we will be making a case against Harriss (1994) suggestion that pretence has




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nothingdirectly to do with belief. Note however that Harris himself (2005) now suggests

that pretend play and conversation about pretence are likely triggers to childrens false

belief understanding ofToM.

Autistic children do not often pretend and are slow to develop a representationalunderstanding of the activities and language of pretence. We have already challenged

Leslies innatist neurobiological explanation of this phenomenon. Harris (1994) argues that

their failure to pretend is due to a broader failure of autistic individuals to represent non-

existent states of affairs, a failure that would account for their inability to plan extended

sequences of action, and so for their well-known failure in such executive functioning tasks

as the Tower of Hanoi puzzle. On this account, the failure of autistic children to engage in

pretence is not specifically tied to their equally well-known deficit in ToM understanding

of false belief (Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985).

This interpretation, however, is undermined by the finding that autistic children are

not completely impaired with respect to pretence. When asked to describe the imagined

physical effects of pretend transformations, they succeed on a par with VMA-matched

normally developing children (Jarrold, Smith & Boucher 1994, Kavanaugh & Harris 1994).

So, while their frequency of engaging in spontaneous pretend play is low, their discourse

about pretence is impaired and while their understanding of the representational character

of pretence may be limited, this does not appear to be due to a difficulty with the non-

existent,per se,but rather with the symbolic representational character of pretend activity

and/or the grammatical properties of the language used to talk about it. (Note, for instance

that in being asked about imagined physical transformations, locutions involving

complementation are not used). Cicchetti, Beeghly and Weis-Perry (1994), for this reason,

argue that autistic childrens impairment with respect to pretence may be primarily a

linguistic and social-developmental impairment. We, of course, share this suspicion

(Garfield, Peterson & Perry 2001). We will argue that this pretence deficit might account

for, rather than issue from, autistic individuals failure to develop ToM.




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4. The Development of the Syntax of Complementation and the Strong Linguistic

Determinism Account of ToM

Both theoretical and empirical considerations suggest that the mastery of the syntactic rules

for sentential complementation in language is crucial for the acquisition ofToM. In theiraccount of the development ofToM, deVilliers (2005) and deVilliers and deVilliers (2000)

propose that children develop their concepts of intentional mental states along with the

lexical and syntactic skills in using to use words for theses states on the analogy of verbs of

speech and their properties. Thus, in order to develop the concept of believing that p, one

must first develop the concept of saying that p. In order to appreciate that one can falsely

believe that p, one must first appreciate that one can falsely say that p; and in order to

understand the syntax and semantics of locutions of the form one must

first understand the syntax and semantics of . In other words, de Villiers

and de Villiers (2000) argue that ToM acquisition can be attributed principally to linguistic

maturation, and in particular to mastery of complementation.

In a series of studies, deVilliers (2005) and her colleagues (de Villiers & de

Villiers, 2000, de Villiers, de Villiers, Schick & Hoffmeister, 2000) obtained evidence to

support this view. For example, they found that children who infrequently expressed

sentential complements in their spontaneous speech (using a test called the Index of

Productive Syntax that has a complementation subscale) routinely failed false belief tests of

ToM. Also they found that 4-and 5-year-olds typically responded correctly to wh-questions

about picture-book characters false beliefs and false statements (e.g., What did he say

that he bought) using complement structures shortly before they began passing standard

inferential false belief tasks.

Senghas and Pyers (2001), in a series of dramatic studies in Nicaragua, presented

evidence for the hypothesis that mastery of the syntactic devices for sentential

complementation is a necessary condition for mastery ofToM. They report on two

generations of profoundly deaf students at a school for the deaf in Nicaragua. The first

generation attended the school at a time when there was no standard sign language for the

deaf extant in that country. When brought together as children, they had had no access to

mature signing conversational partners. Thus they had mastered only a sign pidgin lacking




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complement structures. When tested in adulthood, these deaf men and women still lacked

the syntactic resources to represent complementation or to clearly mark agent roles. The

data are remarkable. Despite having reasonably normal family lives, jobs, etc, none of

theses adult pidgin signers were able in adulthoodto pass a picture-sequencing version of a

simple false belief task normally passed by four-year-olds in standard language

environments. By the second generation of students at the same Nicaraguan school, the

language had creolised and had a full syntactic apparatus typical of sign languages, and all

of the syntactic structure of a human natural language. In line with the deVilliers

predictions, when tested as adolescents, a younger cohort of deaf children who used this

creole had no difficulty with the standard false belief tasks. They had grown up in the same

language community the first cohort yet, through expansion of the language, the second

generation had had access to signed creole that, by including syntactic structures like

sentential complements for verbs of say and think, had enabled them to masterToM,

according to the deVilliers theory.

Notwithstanding its support from data such as these, the deVilliers view has been

subject to recent theoretical and empirical debate (e.g., Lohmann & Tomasello, 2003;

Perner, Zauner & Sprung, 2005). We will re-examine it in light of our own empirical

findings in a later section. Despite our disagreement with the details of their account, we

certainly agree with the deVilliers that in order to attribute beliefs and other propositional

attitudes to others; in order correctly to determine what follows and what does not from the

possession of a belief or from the content of that belief; and in order to anticipate the

typical causes and effects of true and false beliefs in everyday interaction, one must

understand the underlying logic and grammar of complementation and the semantic, lexical

and syntactic properties of epistemic verbs. For instance, one must understand, that if one

believes that p there is something that one believes, that one may believe that p even

though p is false, and that believing that p and believing that p entails q will typically,

though not always, lead to the belief that q, even ifp does notentail q, etc.

We also agree with the deVilliers that childrens syntactic processing skills with

complement clauses, wh-extraction and referential opacity provide useful tests of their

mastery of the grammar sentential complementation. Sentential matrices with embedded

complement sentences for many verbs involved in mentalistic discourse do not allow




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substitution of co-referring terms in the embedded sentence and have overall truth values

that are independent of the truth value of their embedded clauses. It can be true that I

believe that I met the Queen, but not that I believe that I met the most famous breeder of

Welsh corgis in the world; and it can be true that I believe that pigs fly even though my

belief is false.

Wh-extraction (defined as childrens ability to produce wh-questions or reply

sensibly to them) provides a good test of whether children possess the syntactic skills

needed to use epistemic verbs in thought and conversation. For example, in order to reply

correctly to the question What does John think that I bought? the child must represent the

embedded complement sentence as an object of the attitude verb, since wh-extraction is

blocked across sentential boundaries and requires subjacency. Erroneous responses can

reveal a lack of grammatical understanding. For example, these sentences sentence do not

work: (1) John said something. Bill is a fool. Who did John say was a fool? Bill. (2)

John walked into the bar and drank a beer. What did John walk in and drink? A beer.

(3) John caught a boot on his fishing line but Bill and John pretended that John caught a

fish. John caught what? A fish.

The syntax of these constructions is complex and wh-extraction is sensitive to

subtle lexical and grammatical distinctions. For example, within the class of epistemic

verbs there are factive verbs (e.g., know, forget) for which the tensed complement

must be true and wh-movement is blocked and there are non-factives (think, say,

pretend). For non-factives, there is wh-movement to the embedded clause and truth

values are independent. Thus, with reference to the question: When did he remember that

she voted? the time refers to his memory, whereas for When did he think that she

voted? the time asked for is that of her casting her vote. We can therefore test children

regarding their comprehension of complement structure by seeing how well they respect

these rules for wh-extraction in their comprehension and production of embedded

sentences involving different types of complementising verbs.

It is likewise worth noting that not all locutions involving complementising verbs

involve sentential complementation. One can desire that we go to Disneylandor desire to

go to Disneyland. One can want that one has an apple or want an apple. And one can




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pretend that one is Batman or pretend to be Batman. One can say that George is a foolor

one can say, George is a fool. While in some of these cases the truth conditions of the

two members of a pair are the same, in each case the syntax of the two sentences is

different. The complementised version is syntactically and semantically more complex. In

general, children master the infinitival constructions prior to the complementised

constructions, but it is the complementised constructions that are relevant to ToM

acquisition in deVilliers (2005) view.

Up to this point, we have been talking as though the development of

complementation is a uniform phenomenonthat knowledge of this portion of the

grammar is acquired by children independent of the lexical items that take complement

clauses, and then is simply applied to the relevant matrix verbs. But as Bloom, Rispoli,

Gartner and Hafitz (1989) argue convincingly, and as we discover in our own study,

competence with complementation is in fact lexically specific. A child may understand the

grammar of sentences containing embedded sentences governed by one matrix verb, but

not by another, and it is as yet unclear whether there is a typical order of acquisition for all

such verbs. Roeper and de Villiers (1994) also demonstrate that complementation and an

understanding of the rules governing wh-extraction are acquired unevenly, and initially are

understood relative to specific lexical items.

Nor is syntax alone, or even syntactic-plus-lexical development, the only thing at

issue. Conceptual development must be partnered with linguistic development in order for

children to think, and speak, sensibly. One possibility is that some minimal competence

with the grammatical structure of complementation may typically be achieved early in the

third year. However, achieving competence with any particular verb requires not only the

relevant grammatical knowledge, but also conceptual mastery of the concept encoded by

the verb. This is why mastery of complementation for propositional attitude verbs is not

demonstrated until around age four, when ToM is being mastered. But, if so, then failure

to respect the salient syntactic and semantic features of complement sentences when the

matrix verbs are propositional attitude verbs is not an index of limited syntactic or semantic

development,per se,but rather of limited ToM development.

If this argument is correct, the correlation de Villiers and de Villiers discovered




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between syntactic complementation mastery in the case of the propositional attitude verbs

and ToM mastery as indexed by false belief understanding, impressive as it might appear,

would be spurious. There is a curious lacuna in all of the research we have just been

surveying, and that is attention to verbs of pretence. Sentence matrices such as , and have many of the same syntactic

and semantic properties as their doxastic (e.g., says that) and epistemic (thinks that)

counterparts. Wh-extraction from the embedded sentence is permitted; substitutivity of co-

referring terms is not; the falsity of the embedded proposition is independent of the truth of

the overall sentence, etc. But we also know that children are competent pretenders long

before they are able to pass ToM tasks, and that they talk competently about their pretence

with siblings and friends before passing false belief (Hughes & Dunn, 1997).

Moreover, however impressive the complementation data are, there has been no

attention to the verbs of pretence. If it turns out that children acquire competence with

sentences, and respect the semantic and syntactic properties of

complementation in these cases well before they acquire ToM, it would follow that ToM

competence is notsimply a matter of linguistic maturation. We might then suggest that the

close precedence of competence with doxastic, epistemic and assertoric verbs with respect

to ToM is a function not of thegrammarof those verbs but rather of the contentrelation

between those verbs and the concepts deployed in ToM. That is, it could well be that

children acquire an understanding of the properties of these locutions when they begin to

understand the words, and this, because they are coming to master the relevant concepts.

Indeed, as we argue in (2001), there is good independent reason to believe that this

is the case. The fact that a number of social experiential factors such as access within the

family to sibling playmates of child age (Peterson, 2000), frequent maternal conversation

on mentalistic topics (Peterson & Slaughter, 2006), frequent pretend role assignment to

playmates (Astington & Jenkins, 1995) and frequent discussions of pretending with peers

(Hughes & Dunn, 1997) predict preschoolers rapid ToM acquisition independently of

linguistic maturation suggests already that while linguistic maturation may be necessary for

ToM acquisition, it cannot besufficient.

Consequently, in order to better understand how syntactic competence with




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complementation may relate to a conceptual understanding of ToM it is therefore of great

interest to examine the development of childrens syntactic skill with the properties of the

pretend that locution, and this is the aim of our first empirical study

5. Our first study

If a principal function of pretence is to give children experience conversing, manipulating

and reasoning about representations that are discordant with reality, we should observe that

children succeed in talking about pretence using sophisticated syntactic expressions like

embedded sentence complements even before they are able to talk effectively about other

concepts (like belief) and well before they are able to pass standard false belief tests of

ToM. Indeed, we suspect that lexical and syntactic competence with the language of

pretending is cultivated early through conversing about pretence with parents, siblings and

friends, and that linguistic competence in this realm may pre-date equivalent competence

with other epistemic verbs like think or believe. It seems likely that joint pretend play

should enable children to learn to use verbs of imagination, pretend and make-believe, and

to gain linguistic competence with complementising constructions for verbs of pretending

along with an appreciation of their grammatical properties.

Furthermore, if linguistic skill with pretend verbs is acquired early, 3-year-olds who talkabout pretending may also, via language and social conversation, come early to a

conceptual appreciation of the inner subjectivity and reality-discordance of the mental

states of pretending before they are able to understand serious beliefs mentalistically.

Indeed, Hicking Wellman and Gottfried (1987) found that preschoolers who failed standard

inferential false belief tests were often able to respond correctly to similar tests that were

framed in terms of pretending (e.g., by correctly predicting that a actor who pretended

orange juice was in a cup and then left the room would still think there was pretend orange

juice in the cup when she got back, even though the child and experimenter had pretended

to tip the juice out and pour milk into the cup while the actor was away).

In our first study, we will therefore test children syntactic skill with verbs of

pretending as well as their abilities to understand false representation in the context of

pretend and belief. To address three aspects of this role of pretence in the development of




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ToM, we will test thefollowing predictions:

(1) that children demonstrate competence with the syntax of complementised

sentences in the context of pretence verbs substantially prior to their passing of

ToM false belief tests, so that, in particular, children will wh-extract and

respect opacity and other syntactic rules in response to, wh-questions testingtheir awareness and recall pretence scenarios, and their knowledge of real vs.pretend properties of objects substantially before they demonstrate ToM by

passing standard tests of false belief.

(2) that children will demonstrate a conceptual understanding of the subjectivity,

symbolic character and representational diversity of pretending by passingconceptual test questions about false representation in their own and others

mental states in the context of pretending before being able to display an

equivalently sophisticated representational understanding of their own and

others false beliefs on standard ToM tests.

(3) that syntactic mastery of verbs of pretence and their complements will precede

conceptual mastery of pretend as a reality-discrepant representational mental

state.

In addition to these explicit predictions, we will ask two exploratory questions, namely (1)

whether wh-questions about pretending are easier for children to pass when asked during

acts of shared pretending than after a delay so that recall and well as linguistic skills are

required and (2) whether embedded sentence complements involving false speech are more

difficult for 3-year-olds than embedded sentence complements involving pretending. (Since

these latter two questions are not central to our theoretical arguments, and since we know

of no convincing previous empirical evidence on either of them, we have framed them as

exploratory questions rather than experimental hypotheses.)

We tested a total of 42 young preschool children consisting of 29 who were drawn

from daycare centres in western Massachusetts, U.S.A. and 13 who were drawn from

daycare centres in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The children ranged in age from 30

months to 50 months. All had English as their sole or primary language and none had

diagnosed or suspected cognitive, linguistic or perceptual disabilities, according to their

teachers reports. Prior to composition of the sample of 42 children, data from several

additional children whom we had initially attempted to test was rejected due to obvious

inattention, persistent failure to comprehend control questions, refusal to respond,

reluctance to continue or non-compliance with the task demands. All testing was

conducted in quiet areas of the childrens own daycare centres. Verbal mental ages were




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measured using the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT: Dunn & Dunn, 1997) and

ranged from 26 to 87 months.

Each child was tested individually on three pretend enactment scenarios, a false-say

puppet game, two standard false belief tests, the PPVT, a test of understanding of falsebelief in pretend play, dubbed False Belief in Pretend, that task that was modelled on

Hickling et al.s, and four blocks of wh-questions (immediate pretend, delayed

pretend, immediate false say, and delayed false say) that were designed to test

syntactic mastery of embedded sentential complements. The session began with a pre-test

that established that children understood the word pretend or a preferred synonym (e.g.,

make believe). For this pre-test, the tester asked, Do you ever play games of

pretending? Tell me what you played? Have you ever pretended a toy animal was a

person? etc. All children in the present sample gave evidence of understanding. The

experimenter then engaged the child in a series of shared pretend activities in which the

immediate wh- questions were embedded. For example, they pretended that a banana was a

telephone or that a potato was a bar of soap. Then, they pretending to paint a toy car with a

clean brush dipped in an empty paint jar. Finally, they pretended that a chopstick was,

first, a magic wand that made a bunny pop out of a hat and then pretended that it was a

spoon and stirred cake batter, or that a spoon or clothes peg was first a boy asleep then a

running boy. Children in this latter task thus had to maintain two distinct pretend

representations of the stick as well as a representation of its real status. After these pretend

activities the children were introduced to a puppet doll who made a series of preposterously

false statements (e.g., by saying that a toy ant was a bird) and then took further wh-

questions tests of their recall of the shared pretend episodes followed by standard false

belief tests and the PPVT.

Each of our experimental tasks included test questions to establish childrens

competence with the variable(s) the task measured. These test questions are shown

verbatim in Appendix A, along with their scoring rules. In addition, to make sure of

childrens comprehension and attention to the procedures, each task included reality control

questions that asked about the real situation (e.g., What is this really? [asked of the

banana phone] or What is really inside this? [asked in the context of the standard false

belief test involving a candies box that actually contained crayons]. Success on control




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questions gave assurance that children were attending to the tasks and prevented response

sets from developing towards offering imaginary or preposterous answers only. Children

did well on these, perhaps because all the reality control questions were short, and were

both conceptually and syntactically simple (e.g., What is X or What is X really?). In

fact, the vast majority of children in the present sample responded correctly to all or almost

all of the control questions.

We scored each test question as shown in Appendix A. For each child, we then

computed a percentage correct score for each of the following measures: (1) Standard False

Belief, (2) False Belief in Pretend, (3) Pretend Wh-Questions (Immediate Test), (4) Pretend

Wh-Questions (Delayed Test), (5) False-Say Wh-Questions (Immediate Test), and (6)

False-Say Wh-Questions (Delayed Test). For the sake of statistical independence, none of

the measures contained overlapping elements. Thus, for example, even though false belief

questions about pretending were wh-questions with embedded clauses, we did not include

them amongst the items in the Pretend Wh-Questions tests since they were already being

used to tests for specific conceptual understanding of own and others true, false and

obsolete beliefs about pretend representations. For each of our measures, we gave a

summary percentage score that could range from 0 to 100 to reflect the proportion out of

the total numbers of test questions for that measure that the child had answered correctly

(See Appendix). We used percentage scores rather than raw scores to accommodate the fact

that some measures had only two test questions while others had four.

Table 1 shows the childrens mean scores on each measure. In order to test Amsel,

Bobadilla, Coch and Remys (1996) suggestion that 3-year-olds are better able to identify

the pretend states of objects during pretence episodes than after pretend play (when recall

as well as syntactic skills are demanded), we compared childrens scores on the immediate

and delayed Pretend Wh-Question tests using matched-pair t tests. There was no significant

difference between the two means t (41) = 1.83, p =. 08. Thus the slight tendency for

delayed recall scores to be higher was not statistically reliable. More importantly, as the

means in Table 1 indicate, children were highly accurate in processing syntactically

complex wh-questions with embedded complements so as to correctly answer questions

about both ongoing and previous episodes of pretending. In fact 19 children (45 percent of

the sample) made no errors at all on the immediate pretend wh-questions and 26 (62




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percent) were similarly perfectly accurate on the delayed pretend wh-questions.

Combining delayed and immediate pretend wh-questions together (the Pretend-Wh Total in

Table 1), children earned a mean of 78.63 percent accuracy on these embedded sentences

involving verbs of pretence.

To test our first hypothesis, that children achieve competence with the syntax of

complementised sentences in the context of pretence verbs substantially prior to their

passing of standard ToM false belief tests, we first compared the childrens mean score of

78.63 on the total set of pretend wh-questions with their mean of 39.29 on the standard

false belief tests ofToM, using matched-pair t tests. There was a statistically significant

difference between the two means, t (41) = 6.90, p < .001, supporting our hypothesis. In

other words, the 3-year-olds in the present sample were significantly better at processing

the syntax of embedded complements with verbs of pretence to answer our immediate and

delayed pretend wh-questions than they were at answering standard false belief tests

questions that required an understanding of representational change (Gopnik & Slaughter,

1991) and of the falsity of others beliefs about the identities and contents of perceptually

misleading stimuli.

To test the hypothesis that syntactic mastery of verbs of pretence and their

complements precedes conceptual mastery of the representational state of pretend as a

reality-discrepant and subjective cognitive process, we compared childrens mean scores

on the pretend-wh questions (immediate and delayed combined) with their scores on the

novel false belief test questions about pretending (from the false belief pretend task).

Again, the means (see Table 1) were found to differ significantly in the expected direction,

t (41) = 3.84, p < .001, supporting our hypothesis. In other words, as we had predicted,

children in the present sample were significantly better at processing the syntax of

embedded complements with verbs of pretence in order to answer our immediate and

delayed wh-questions about pretend actions and pretend identities that were part of their

experimentally shared pretend activities than they were at answering questions about the

true and false beliefs of people who were, or were not, privy to ongoing acts of imaginary

mental representation.

Finally, to test the hypothesis that childrens conceptual understanding of the




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subjectivity, symbolic character and representational diversity of pretence will exceed their

conceptual understanding of serious belief so that they score higher on conceptual test

questions about false representation in their own and others mental states in the context of

pretending than on equivalent test questions about their own and others false beliefs in

standard ToM tests, we compared means on the standard false belief and false belief in

pretend tests. Again, the means (see Table 1) were found to differ significantly in the

expected direction, t (41) = 2.80, p < .01, supporting our hypothesis. In other words, as we

had predicted, children were more likely to pass false belief questions (What will X/did

you think) when the mental representations being asked about were pretences than

when they were serious beliefs about the contents or boxes or the true identities of trick

objects. This finding, consistent with an earlier finding by Hickling et al., is in line with our

hypothesis that children master representational understanding first in the context of shared

pretend play.

Although not central to our theory, we also explored childrens performance on the

immediate and delayed false say questions about the foolish puppet (e.g., Simon says

that this lemon is blue) and found that these were higher than scores on the standard ToM

tasks, t (41) = 6.26, p < .001. False-say scores were also higher than scores on the false

belief in pretend test, t (41) = 3.14, p < .01. There was no significant difference between

childrens scores on pretend wh-questions and the false-say wh-questions, t < 1, although

the much smaller number of questions on the latter than the former test renders this

comparison at best only tentative.

Table 1. Childrens (n = 42) performance on the syntax and false belief tests of Study 1

Mean Score Standard

Deviation

Range ofObserved

Scores

Percent Perfect

Scores

Standard False

Belief

39.29 33.19 0-100 14%

False Belief

about Pretend

58.33 31.07 0-100 29%




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Pretend Wh-

Questions

(Immediate)

74.40 28.95 0-100 45%

Pretend Wh-

Questions

(Delayed)

82.86 27.30 0-100 62%

False-Say Wh

(Delayed)

77.79 0-100 64%

Total False-Say

Wh-Questions

(Immediate plus

delayed)

77.78 30.39 0-100 55%

These results are consistent with a developmental sequence in which, first, linguistic

competence with verbs of pretence and, later, the conceptual understanding that pretence

representations are subjective and might vary among people, develop through engaging in

pretend play and conversation in a Vygostkyan zone of proximal development. Only later

are children able to perform solitary, independent inferences regarding the subjectivity and

interpersonal variation among belief representations that they will need in order to

understand false belief and its consequences and so to pass standard ToM tests.

6. Conclusions from this study

This initial study provides evidence that linguistic competence with complementation,understood syntactically and semantically, arises first for verbs of pretence and only later in

the context of the serious beliefs about reality that are examined on standard false belief

tests ofToM. This gives verbs of pretence, and hence the imaginary cognitive activities

that they describe, along with the concepts they encode, a special place in human cognitive

development. Syntactic complementation is an essential feature of human languages, and




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is the device that at least makes it possible for us to attribute propositional attitudes to

ourselves and our fellows. Furthermore, we argue that, if certain plausible epistemological

assumptions are accepted, conversational exchanges and embedded complements as

linguistic representations make it possible for children to conceptualise and mentally reflect

upon these states. Engaging in pretence, and understanding pretence, by transitivity, is a

necessary condition of our coming to full self-consciousness as persons.

We conclude that through coming to understand the meaning and grammar of

pretend that children learn about the phenomena of opacity and of non-truth-

functionality. This is how they learn, sometime soon after the third birthday in typical

circumstances, first that representations in pretending may not track reality; that inferences

in the context of pretending are mediated by representations and not by the world. Later,

between the ages of four and five, they learn that serious beliefs can also be false, so that

others might see things differently from the way we do. The banana and the telephone

provide a first stepping stone to Oedipus Rex. These phenomena are also crucial for our

move from understanding direct to understanding indirect discourse and so the possibility

of detaching content from language in thought.

The fact that pretence and its discourse occurs first in joint play and in conversation

about that play supports two of Vygotskys theses: language emerges as a social co-

ordination device and only later acquires a representational function; and collective

understanding and joint competence precede individual understanding and autonomous

competence. Here we see the joint activity of constructing and discussing public and

deliberately false representations in pretend play as an antecedent to any internalisation of

this ability as the capacity to represent and to reason about false belief. Indeed, when these

findings are joined with those of de Villiers and de Villiers (2000) we see a strong

argument for the claim that the mastery of pretence activities and the representational

language for discussing pretence are crucial precursors to the mastery ofToM. On the

other hand, we deny that the mastery of sentential complementation in pretend play, per se

is enough on its ownit occurs too early in the game; we also deny that the mastery of

ToM is made possible simply by linguistic maturationsocial-cognitive development and

the sharing of cognitive perspectives with others during pretend play and during serious

debates about reality-oriented beliefs about the world are undoubtedly necessary as well.




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These social activities may supply cognitive insights regarding the contents of playmates

minds and imaginations.

These data help to answer two of the problems with which we opened this paper.

We have an idea about what pretence might be for as a cultured and/or evolutionarilyselected childish proclivitythat is, we know why it can be advantageous to youngHomo

sapiens to spend a lot of time pretending. That is how they acquire syntactic skill for

talking about reality-discrepant imaginary situations and, eventually, ToM. And if a young

Homo sapiens doesnt acquire ToM it and its genes are not long for this world. It might be

natural forHomo sapiens to develop an understanding of mind, but that understanding is

secondnature. We acquire it through an artifice towards which nature inclines us. We have

suggested how it might be that the linguistic maturation involved in the acquisition of

sentential complementation figures in ToM acquisition, and how social and linguistic

maturation interact in the zone of proximal development relevant to ToM acquisition.

With these preliminary conclusions we can begin to explain the ToM deficit

associated with autism. Before making these connections, however, we will summarize a

challenge to our position presented by Lillard (2001) and then present our second

experiment that addresses this alternative proposal ofToM acquisition and strengthens our

case for a staged acquisition of pretence and ToM.

7. Lillards Challenge

Lillard (2001) argues that two similar but slightly different representations of a situation

are established and used in pretend play. Children represent both an imagined world, and

the situation in the real world. As Lillard puts it, pretense involves a pretender, a reality, a

mental representation, the intentional projection of that mental representation onto the

reality, and the pretenders awareness. [2001, 497]

Lillard discusses the normal development of pretence understanding in children

aged two to five. She argues that although two year olds can engage in joint pretend play

and handle counterfactuals within pretence scenarios and three year olds can distinguish

real from pretend (and use verbs of pretence in play and engage in solitary pretence), it is




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not until age four and the concurrent development ofToM that children cease representing

pretence purely as concrete action, involving no mental component. Lillard argues that it is

not until well after the acquisition ofToM that four and five year olds attain a well-

developed mentalistic understanding of pretence and pretence discourse. She argues that

the understanding ofToM as measured by the false belief task develops before an

understanding of pretend play, and that an intertwined developmental relationship

between social and cognitive skills and the activity of pretend play is complete only

subsequent to the acquisition ofToM.

The data arising from Lillards Moe paradigm ground her assertion that ToM

acquisition is required before an understanding of pretend play can develop. In the Moe

experiment, children are shown a toy trollMoeand are presented with various

scenarios in which Moe is engaging in pretend play. For example, Moe is described as

pretending that he is a rabbit. It is pointed out that in doing so, he is hopping like a

kangaroo, despite the fact that he has never seen and does not know what a kangaroo is.

Children are then asked questions regarding the role of knowledge and intent in pretend

play. For example, is Moe pretending to be a kangaroo? Is Moe trying to pretend to be a

kangaroo? In this particular experiment, no children under the age of 4 were tested because

the Moe paradigm relies on children having a reasonable understanding of the

implications of knowledge for action, which other experiments suggest is reliable by age 4

years. (Lillard, 2001)

Lillard tested many of the same children that were used for the Moe experiment

forToM competence on standard false belief tests as well. She found that children who

failed the Moe task (generally age five or older) often also failed herToM tasks, while

the children who passed the Moe task (generally five-year olds) also passed herToM

tasks. She concludes that the passing of pretence tasks depends on the passing ofToM

tasks, and so that pretence cannot act as a scaffold for the development ofToM. Instead,

she asserts that false belief understanding develops before an understanding of the role of

mind in pretend play, and that this latter development is guided by social-cognitive skills

for computing false beliefs about the real world in conjunction with lengthy experience in

joint pretend play so that representational understanding of pretend may not be acquired by

typically developing, healthy children until age 8 years or later (Richert & Lillard, 2002).




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We were suspicious of the standard Lillard sets for understanding pretence. We

noted that the Moe task only tested elements of the understanding of pretence that

presupposed the mastery ofToM, and we suspected that there are other elements of

pretence that could be understood withouta fully developed ToM, including an

understanding of false belief. Furthermore, these independent elements might be

instrumental in scaffolding the development ofToM. As Lillard views pretending as an

action foremost inprojecting a mental representation onto the here and now, with

knowledge, attitude, and intention; her task tests only the understanding of knowledge and

intent. We suspected that children might develop a robust understanding of pretence even

before cognitive concepts of knowledge and intent enter their cognitive repertoires,

especially since ToM research (e.g., Wellman & Liu, 2004) suggests that an understanding

of knowledge access does not emerge until just before an understanding of serious false

belief and intent understanding may be even later to develop (Peterson, 1995). Indeed, as

we have argued based on the data in Study 1, a more basic understanding of pretence seems

to enable children to develop the understanding of knowledge and intent that issues in

ToM. ToM, in turn,enables the more complex understanding of pretence that Lillard

argues is consequent on ToM competence.

8. Our second study

In our second study, we examine the possibility that an understanding of pretence

may develop in stages, with some of these stages preceding and facilitating an

understanding ofToM, while others may follow it and require ToM acquisition before they

can be manifest (as was demonstrated in Lillards Moe task and Richert & Lillards

data). Specifically, we test the prediction that children first demonstrate competence in wh-

extraction from the pretend that matrix, demonstrating an ability to represent pretence

and the understanding of the difference between pretence and reality. We examine whether,

later in the acquisition of a conceptual understanding of pretence, children come to realize

that pretend identities do not leak into realitythat pretence is a bounded activity distinct

from reality, that pretence induces referential opacity, and that pretence is bounded by the

social and/or cognitive stipulations of the pretence situation, while concurrently




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demonstrating a linguistic understanding of the pragmatic and semantic aspects of pretence

and the fact that pretence involves representation discordant with reality. At the final stage

of acquisition, we predict, children will come to a fuller understanding of the role of

knowledge and intent in pretence, and will fully integrate an understanding ofToM into

the understanding of pretence in the manner or adults. Only this final stage, on our view,

requires and follows ToM acquisition as demonstrated by the ability to pass false-belief

tasks.

We are also concerned in this study to further document the development of the

grammatical operation of complementation that we discovered in Study 1. We provide

further evidence supporting Study 1s findings that children learn how to handle

complement structures verb by verb, only as they come to socially engage with, and hence

to develop a conceptual understanding of the properties of those verbs. We suggest that

ToM is not only a consequence of the development of this grammatical capacity, but that

competence with complementation is sensitive to conceptual acquisition and is not purely

(if at all) a matter of the maturation of an innately determined linguistic module.

This second study involves three tasks testing childrens understanding of pretence.

Fifteen children age 30 months to 54 months recruited from a daycare center in Western

Massachusetts who passed control questions were tested. The details are presented in the

appendix. The first two tasks involved videos of actual children pretending either to be

birds or bats (Molly and Chris are pretending to be birds/bats, they are pretending to fly,

etc.) In the third task, we used a toy cat, Zo, to replicate Lillards Moe paradigm in

order to determine whether the two layers of pretence required in this task would add an

additional cognitive burden. In all three tasks, children were asked questions testing the

following: wh-extraction (What are Chris and Molly pretending thatthey are/can do?),

understanding of the bounds of pretence (Are theystillpretending to be birds?), the

difference between insider and outsider knowledge (Does Julie [a nave outsider] know

what Chris and Molly are pretending that they are?), the dual identity of pretence objects

(Are Chris and Molly really birds?) and of the opacity of pretence verbs (Are they

pretending that they are children?), the

j garfield lets pretend

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