Five-year-olds' handling of reference and description in the domains of language and mental representation

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. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.