Lets Pretend: How Pretence Scaffolds the Acquisition of Theory of Mind

Jay L Garfield, Smith College University of Melbourne Central 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

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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 of theory 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-cognitive development, arguing that pretence is crucially involved in the acquisition of ToM. We demonstrate that successful understanding of pretence discourse, including the syntactic and semantic properties of sentential complements in the context of verbs of 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 that fail 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 of ToM. We also demonstrate that the developmental track of pretence and ToM allows us to see how social, conceptual and linguistic development work together to scaffold the development of the understanding of mind. We conclude that childrens early involvement 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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Garfield, Peterson et al., page 2 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 young Homo sapiens have so much to learn about the concrete physical world and so many real things 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 real objects 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 bad thing. 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? Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 3 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 byproduct 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 nonexistent 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 all typically developing children do it. The best way to practice serious goal-directed behaviour would be to do just 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 4 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 after pretence, 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 lack ToM. The argument goes like this: Pretending is only fun if you are aware that you are Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 5 entertaining mental representations that fail to accord with reality. But that in 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 neither group 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 of ToM 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 6 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 of ToM. 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 of ToM. These apparent sequences provide additional evidence for our view that pretence scaffolds the development of ToM. 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 7 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 preschoolers understanding 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 of ToM, a full understanding 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 of ToM.

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 of ToM. 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 8 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 for ToM. (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 of ToM 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 9 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 and pretend 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 master ToM 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 10 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. Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 11 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 of ToM acquisition. He writes:
It is hard to see how perceptual evidence could ever force an adult, let alone a young child, to invent 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 nonfactive, as opposed to the facticity of know and see. He argues that decoupling in this sense is at the heart of metarepresentation and hence of ToM. 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 of ToM 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 12 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. Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 13 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 of ToM 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 belief is 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 makebelieve outcomes (p. 251) Since children do not need to represent the fact that they are representing but only must be able to represent the non-existent, there is no need for ToM 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 14 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 of ToM 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 is for in an evolutionary or teleological developmental sense. We will argue that pretence is precisely for 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 15 nothing directly 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 of ToM. Autistic children do not often pretend and are slow to develop a representational understanding 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 nonexistent 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 nonexistent, 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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Garfield, Peterson et al., page 16 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 of ToM. In their account of the development of ToM, 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 <S believes that p> one must first understand the syntax and semantics of <S says that p>. 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 of ToM. 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 17 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 adulthood to 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 master ToM, 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 if p does not entail 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 18 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 Disneyland or desire to go to Disneyland. One can want that one has an apple or want an apple. And one can Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 19 pretend that one is Batman or pretend to be Batman. One can say that George is a fool or 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 20 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 <S pretends that p>, <S dreams that p> and <S makes believe that p> 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 coreferring 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 <pretend that> 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 not simply 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 the grammar of those verbs but rather of the content relation 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 be sufficient. Consequently, in order to better understand how syntactic competence with Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 21 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 talk about 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 22 ToM, we will test the following 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 testing their 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 passing conceptual 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 23 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 false belief 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 whquestions 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 24 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 25 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 of ToM, 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 26 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 Standard False Belief False Belief about Pretend Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission. 58.33 31.07 0-100 29% 39.29 33.19 Range of Observed Scores 0-100 Percent Perfect Scores 14%

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 27 Pretend WhQuestions (Immediate) Pretend WhQuestions (Delayed) False-Say Wh (Delayed) Total False-Say Wh-Questions (Immediate plus delayed) 77.78 30.39 0-100 55% 77.79 0-100 64% 82.86 27.30 0-100 62% 74.40 28.95 0-100 45%

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 of ToM. 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 28 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-truthfunctionality. 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 coordination 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 of ToM. 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. Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 29 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 evolutionarily selected childish proclivitythat is, we know why it can be advantageous to young Homo 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 for Homo sapiens to develop an understanding of mind, but that understanding is second nature. 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 of ToM 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 30 not until age four and the concurrent development of ToM that children cease representing pretence purely as concrete action, involving no mental component. Lillard argues that it is not until well after the acquisition of ToM that four and five year olds attain a welldeveloped mentalistic understanding of pretence and pretence discourse. She argues that the understanding of ToM 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 of ToM. 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 for ToM 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 her ToM tasks, while the children who passed the Moe task (generally five-year olds) also passed her ToM tasks. She concludes that the passing of pretence tasks depends on the passing of ToM tasks, and so that pretence cannot act as a scaffold for the development of ToM. 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). Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 31 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 of ToM, and we suspected that there are other elements of pretence that could be understood without a fully developed ToM, including an understanding of false belief. Furthermore, these independent elements might be instrumental in scaffolding the development of ToM. As Lillard views pretending as an action foremost in projecting 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 of ToM, 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 whextraction 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 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 32 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 of ToM 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 that they are/can do?), understanding of the bounds of pretence (Are they still pretending 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 failure of the leakage of pretend identity to reality (Can Chris and Molly really fly?), the relation of knowledge and intent to pretence (Are they trying to pretend to be birds?; If bats fly in the same way, and they do not know Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 33 what bats are, are they pretending to be bats?), and expectations regarding others knowledge of the contents of pretence. (What will Julie [who hasnt seen the game]/ Sally [who has seen the game] say that we are doing? In addition to these tasks, we tested for ToM using standard false belief tests: an unseen displacement task (Baron-Cohen, Leslie & Frith, 1985) and a misleading container task similar to Study 1. Both were presented by video, with picture-completion test questions. Additional probe questions allowed us to assign a degree of ToM competence in addition to scoring children categorically either as passing or failing each false belief task. Results showed that children who failed both standard false belief tests of ToM correctly demonstrated an understanding that pretence is always confined to the pretence situation, answering 97% (29 of 30) questions correctly (t =14; p<. 0001). Furthermore, ToM failers asserted that pretend properties do not leak into reality, answering 93 percent (89 of 30) of questions correctly. (t =8; p<. 0001). They also demonstrated the capacity to Wh-extract in pretence contexts, with 81% (24 of 30) questions answered correctly. (t = 3.41; p<. 007). However, children who failed ToM tests only answered 57% of opacity questions correctly, and only 33% of questions tracking whether one needs to know about that which one is pretending to be correctly. In other words, ToM failers did not demonstrate competence at keeping track of the opacity of pretence descriptions at a level above that to be expected by chance, and even fewer understood ignorance/knowledge issues in Lillards formulae (e.g., that a person cant pretend to be what an animal s/he has never seen and knows nothing about). Table 2: Resulsts of Friedman ANOVA by ranks on Study 2 Data Variable Mean rank Order

Wh-extraction

4.63

Leakage

3.87

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Garfield, Peterson et al., page 34 Opacity 3.77 2

Boundedness

3.60

Pretence in ignorance

2.60

Third-party knowledge

2.53

Kendall /Friedman =. 273, Chi2=20.5, p<. 001 Table 2 presents the results of a Kendall/Friedman analysis of the performance data from study 2. This table ranks the tasks in the order in which they are passed, with taks at level (1) passed significantly before tasks at level (2), and tasks at level (2) passed before tasks at level (3). The ordering is highly significant. As the table indicates, children successfully Wh-extract prior to understanding that pretence identities do not leak into reality, that verbs of pretence are opaque and that pretence identities are bounded by the duration of the pretence. They develop these understandings in turn prior to understanding that you cannot pretend to be what you dont know about, and prior to understanding what third parties will know about ones pretence. These data demonstrate convincingly that the acquisition of pretence understanding is staged and that only those components that explicitly involve the attribution of mental states postdate ToM acquisition. The final stage of the understanding of pretence is that at which children understand its relationship to knowledge and intent and indeed these necessitate the acquisition of ToM. This is in fact the only stage of competence in pretense that Lillard tests in her Moe paradigm. Her data are hence not surprising, but her conclusion that ToM scaffolds pretense understanding is undermined by these data. We conclude that the acquisition of pretence understanding is staged, and that the earlier stages of the understanding of pretense indeed scaffold the acquisition of ToM, which in turn enables a complete metacognitive understanding of pretence. Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 35

9.

Conclusions Taken together, these two studies provide compelling, though to be sure,

nondemonstrative, evidence for our social-developmental hypothesis. We have shown that the acquisition of the understanding of pretence occurs over time, but that it is clearly staged and that it overlaps the acquisition of ToM in a very suggestive way. Children first master the syntax of verbs of pretence; then, along with an understanding of the relationship of pretence to reality, they acquire competence with the semantic properties of these verbs. This mastery, in the context of the collective manipulation of contrary-to-fact representations in which joint pretend play consists, gives children an understanding of how to talk about and to reason about representations of the non-actual. After acquiring these capacities, children develop the complex of capacities to which we refer as Theory of Mind. With this complex in hand, children are able to reason about the epistemic states of those observing or participating in pretence, thus completing their mastery of this concept. The first two stages of this developmental sequence occur during the second half of the third year and the fourth year of life in normally developing children; the third and fourth occur late in the fourth and early in the fifth year. The development of an understanding of pretence correlates strongly with verbal mental age, suggesting, though to sure, not demonstrating, that it is a genuinely developmental phenomenon. Moreover, we have demonstrated that the development of complementation is strongly lexicalized. There is no turning on of a general switch in the linguistic module engendering mastery of this operation for the full range of verbs that take sentential complements. Instead, children learn how to handle complement structures verb by verb, as they come to understand the properties of those verbs. This undermines the view that the mastery of ToM is simply a consequence of developing this grammatical capacity in the course of linguistic maturation as may have been suggested by the de Villiers and Senghas and Pyers data. Competence with complementation occurs too early for that, and the operation seems as sensitive to concept acquisition as it does to grammatical maturation. These data support our Vygostkyan-Sellarsian model of cognitive development, according to which the development of the linguistic devices that enable discourse about Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 36 public representations in joint activity are the precursors of linguistic devices for the attribution of inner representation, both in language and in thought. This perspective takes seriously the essentially social nature of Homo sapiens, and the rich lode of information the social milieu provides to the developing juvenile. It only makes sense that we have evolved both to contribute to that milieu through pretend play and to exploit it by using that information to develop the capacity for ToM so necessary to our reproductive success. Eventually, these discoveries may have possible clinical application as well. If the tragic ToM deficits that have been found to be so debilitating to individuals with autism are in fact the product, and not the cause of, the failure to engage in pretend play during early development at home and at preschool, then intensive play therapy intervention aimed at stimulating pretend play and developing competence in deploying and discussing pretend representations might help to ameliorate this some of the behavioral and cognitive difficulties autistic children encounter. Training studies, though beyond the scope of the present research, could effectively test such a hypothesis, in line with Harriss (2005) observation that the suggestive findings of an earlier research tradition provided convincing evidence that training in dramatic play can have beneficial effects on childrens social cognition in general (p. 78).

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Garfield, Peterson et al., page 37 Appendix A Questions and Scoring Rules for Study 1 Tasks (A) Standard False Belief: Misleading Container Test (Tester displays candies box with
pictured candies on the outside and shows it really contains crayons)

Test Question 1: Others False Belief (Standard) X is coming next. S/he hasnt seen inside this box. When I first show it to him/her all closed up like this, what will s/he think is in it? (correct answer = candies) Test Question 2: Own False Belief/ Representational Change What did you think was in this at first, before I opened it? (correct answer = candies) (B) Standard False Belief: Misleading Appearance Test (Tester displays trick pen with tip
concealed that looks like a familiar item [flower, carrot, or candy cane], then writes with it to show it is really a pen)

Test Question 1: Others False Belief X is coming next. S/he hasnt seen this before. When I first show it to him/her like this, before I write with it, what will s/he think it is, a [flower] or a pen? (correct answer = [flower]) Test Question 2: Own False Belief/ Representational Change What did you think it was in at first, before I wrote with it? (correct answer = [flower] (C) False Belief about Pretence (Tester engages child in pretending to paint a green toy car red and
then puts away the (empty jar and brush) painting materials)

Test Question 1: Others False Belief (about pretence) X is coming next. S/he hasnt seen us pretending to paint. When I first show him/her this car like this, what color will s/he think that it is? (correct answer: cars true color = green) Test Question 2: Own False Belief/ Representational Change (about pretence) Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 38 What did color did you pretend that it was when we played our painting game before? (correct answer: imaginary color = red) (D) Wh-Questions about Pretence: Immediate Test (Tester engages child in pretending to, for
example, wash hands with a potato, paint car and use stick as a magic wand then a spoon)

(1) What are you pretending that this [E shows child potato] is? (correct answer = soap) (2) What color are we pretending that this car is? (correct answer = red) (3) What did you just pretend that the stick was? (correct answer = magic wand) (4) What are you pretending that the stick is now? (correct answer = spoon) (E) Wh-Questions about Pretence: Delayed Test (for above version of procedure with potato
hand washing, etc.)

(1) When we played our game just now, what did you pretend that the potato was? (correct answer = soap) (2) What did you do with the car when we played pretending? (correct answer = paint it) (3) What did you pretend that that the stick was? (correct answers = magic wand or spoon) (4) What did you do with the stick when we played pretending [make believe]? (correct answers =magic, get rabbit or stir cake) (F) False Say Wh-Questions: Immediate Test (Tester introduces a puppet dog or monkey called
Simon who is said to come from far away where they sometimes say strange things. Tester asks the puppet questions and acts out the puppet giving series of preposterous responses (e.g., blue when asked the color of a realistic toy lemon, etc.))

(1) What did color did Simon just say that this [lemon] is? (correct answer = blue) (2) What did Simon say that this {plastic insect] is? (correct answer = bird) (G) False Say Wh-Questions: Delayed Test (1) When we played with Simon before, what color did Simon say that the lemon was? (correct answer = blue) (2) What did Simon say that the insect was? (correct answer = bird)

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Garfield, Peterson et al., page 39 Appendix 2: Test Questions for Second study Replication of Moe paradigm Child is showed a black plush cat.

Experimenter: Zo is a cat. Zo sees birds flying every day. Zo knows a lot about birds. Right now Zo is pretending to be a bird. Zo is pretending to fly. Experimenter and child make cat fly. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. What is Zo pretending to be?[control] What is Zo really, a cat or a bird? [leakage] What is Zo pretending to do? [control] Can Zo really fly? [leakage] What is Zo pretending that she is? [embedded complement clause] 6. What is Zo pretending that she can do? [embedded complement clause] 7. Experimenter: Bats also fly like this. Zo has never seen a bat and doesnt know what a bat is. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Do bats fly? [control] Does Zo know that bats fly? [control] Does Zo know that birds fly? [control] Is Zo pretending to be a bat? [intention] Is Zo pretending to be a bird? [control] Is Zo trying to pretend to be a bat? [intention] Is Zo trying to pretend to be a bird? [control]

Knowledge of others regarding content of pretence Experimenter: Lets play a game and pretend that we are all red birds. 1. 2. 3. 4. What are we pretending to be? What color bird are you pretending to be? What color bird is Zo pretending to be? Points to camera operator. That is <name>. S/he has been watching us. What color are we? What color will s/he say Zo is? Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 40 [observer knowledge] 5. Experimenter: (Insert name of teacher here) does not know about our game. 1. When (Insert name of teacher here) comes in what color will she say that Zo is? [non-observer knowledge] 2. Boundedness Experimenter: Zo has stopped pretending to be a bird. Now she is playing with blocks. <Have Zo move to blocks. > 1. Is Zo still pretending to be a bird? 2. Is Zo still pretending to fly?

Video Protocol. Video is presented on computer screen, controlled by PowerPoint. Three child actors, Chris, Molly and Angie. Chris: Hi Molly! I know a lot about birds. Look at this picture of a bird. <Holds up picture of a bird> Molly: Me too Chris! I see them flying everyday! C: Lets pretend to be birds. M: Ok! Lets pretend we are birds flying around. C: Ok! Angie: Ill watch you. M: OK, Angie, you watch. <Chris and Molly flap arms and run around> Video Stops. Test Questions 1 Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 41 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. What are Chris and Molly pretending to be? [control] What are they really? [control] What are Chris and Molly pretending to do? [control] Can they really fly? [control] What are Chris and Molly pretending that they are? [embedded comp clause] 6. What are they pretending that they can do? [embedded comp clause]

Experimenter shows still picture of Chris and Molly flapping arms. Experimenter: Bats also fly like that. Chris and Molly have never seen bats. They dont know what bats are. <Picture of a bat is shown> Experimenter: This is a bat. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Do bats fly? [control] Do Chris and Molly know that bats fly? [control] Do they know that birds fly? [control] Are Chris and Molly pretending to be bats? [intent condition] Are they pretending to be birds? [control] Are Chris and Molly trying to pretend to be bats? [intent condition] Are they trying to pretend to be birds? [control]

Video Starts. Molly: Lets pretend were red birds. Chris: Ok! Molly: Angie, you watch us! <flap around> Chris: What color are we, Angie? Video Stops. 1. What are Chris and Molly pretending to be? [If they do not include color, read next question] 2. What color birds are they pretending to be? Draftof6/10/12:Donotquotewithoutpermission.

Garfield, Peterson et al., page 42 3. Does Angie know what Chris and Mollie are pretending to be? [observer knowledge] 4. Will Angie say that Chris and Molly are red? [observer knowledge]

Video Starts. A still picture is shown of Julie. Video Stops. Experimenter: This is Julie. She is going to go into the room where Molly and Chris are. Julie doesnt know what Chris and Molly are pretending to be. Video Starts. Julie walks into the room that Chris and Molly are in. Molly: Julie! What color are we? Video Stops. 1. Does Julie know what Chris and Molly are pretending to be? [third party knowledge] 2. Will Julie say that Chris and Molly are red? [third party knowledge]

Video Starts.

Molly: [stops flapping arms] Lets play with blocks now. Chris: Ok! Video Stops. 1. Are Chris and Molly still pretending to be birds? [boundedness] 2. Are they still pretending to fly? [boundedness]

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