Young children's understanding of pretense expressions of independent agency

Two-year-old children were required to use nonliteral words or actions to complete scenarios in which a doll acted as the agent of a series of make-believe events. An experimenter encoded the doll's imaginary intentions either verbally or through pretend actions. No gender differences were observed, but older 2-year-olds performed reliably better than younger 2-year-olds. In addition, episodes that required children to enact the conclusion to events that began with doll-directed actions proved difficult to comprehend. Discussion focuses on the implications of children's understanding of independent agency for joint sociodramatic play and on the problem of intersubjectivity in children's understanding of an adult's nonliteral intentions.