title: Five-year-olds' handling of reference and description in the domains of language and mental representation.
abstract: Children's concurrent success on false belief tasks and their handling of two labels for one object (e.g., bunny/rabbit) has been interpreted as demonstrating understanding about the essential features of representation. Three experiments reveal the limitations in 5-year-olds' understanding for both mental and linguistic representations. We report relatively poor performance on a task involving two labels for one object (e.g., dice/eraser) which required children to treat another's knowledge as representing only some of the feature of its real referent: Dice but not eraser. Five year olds who made errors also had difficulty handling the fact that a written word 'dice' referring to such a dice/eraser, can also be applied to a standard dice but not to a standard eraser. These children lacked metalinguistic awareness of words as entities that both refer and describe.
authors.affiliation: School of Psychology, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, B15 2TT, Birmingham, UK. i.a.apperly@bham.ac.uk
authors.forename: I A
authors.initials: IA
authors.lastname: Apperly
authors.forename: E J
authors.initials: EJ
authors.lastname: Robinson
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002663:Child Language; D002675:Child, Preschool; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008606:Mental Processes / Q000502:physiology*; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis