Do young children use objects as symbols?Michael Tomasello*, Tricia Striano and Philippe RochatDepartment of Psychology, Emory University, USAMuch of young children’s symbolic play is heavily scaffolded by adult symbolic actionmodels, which children may imitate, and by adult verbal scripts. The current studiesattempted to evaluate 18–35-month-old children’s symbolic skills in the absence ofsuch scaffolding. In a study of symbol comprehension, children were tested for theirability to comprehend an adult’s use of either a replica object or an associated gestureto communicate which object in an array she wanted. In a study of symbol production,children were given some objects that afforded symbolic manipulations, but withoutadult symbolic action models or verbal scripts. The results of the two studiesconverged to suggest that children below 2 years of age have symbolic skills withgestures, but not with objects. It was also found that while children at 26 months wereable to use an object as a symbol for another object, they had difculties when thesymbol had another conventional use (e.g. a drinking cup used as a hat). The ndingsare discussed in terms of DeLoache’s dual representation model, and a modication ofthat model is proposed.Beginning with Piaget (1945/1951), investigators have considered much of youngchildren’s play with objects to be symbolic. The conventional wisdom is that symbolicplay with objects emerges at the same age as the use of other types of symbols, includingtrue linguistic symbols, at around 18 months of age. Some investigators see evidence forsymbolic play at even earlier ages, perhaps as early as 12–14 months, before infants areusing true linguistic symbols at all (e.g. Nicolich, 1977).This classic view relies mainly on naturalistic observations (e.g. Bretherton, 1984;Fenson, 1984; Nicolich, 1977; Shore, 1986). However, a sceptic might legitimately askthe question: When an infant places a doll into a doll bed, on what basis do we determinethat he or she is symbolically placing a real baby into a real bed? How do we know thathe or she is not simply putting the doll into the bed in the same way he or she puts berriesinto a bowl—with no symbolism involved at all? Exacerbating such concerns is the factthat the infant has very likely seen an adult putting this same object (doll) into this samecontainer (bed) on previous occasions. And indeed there are a number of observational andexperimental observations of children mimicking adults’ actions on objects during thisage range. For example, Fenson (1984) and Bretherton (1984) both found that20–28-month-old children in freeplay situations made object substitutions (e.g. using ablock as a car) most often immediately after an adult had performed that same act. Tamis-* Requests for reprints should be addressed to Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute for EvolutionaryAnthropology, Inselstrasse 22, D-04103 Leipzig, Germany (e-mail:[email protected]).563British Journal of Developmental Psychology (1999), 17, 563–584 Printed in Great Britain© 1999 The British Psychological SocietyLamonda & Bornstein, 1991, found a strong correlation between the complexity ofmothers’ and their children’s symbolic play actions across the second year of life.Experimentally, when children of this age are systematically exposed to actions thatadults see as symbolic, they quite often imitate them (e.g. Bornstein, Vibbat, Tal &O’Donnel, 1992; Jackowitz & Watson, 1980; McCabe & Uzgiris, 1983; Ungerer, Zelazo,Kearsley & O’Leary, 1981; Vibbert & Bornstein, 1989; Watson & Fischer, 1977). Someinvestigators have considered an imitative explanation for early symbolic play, butdismiss it because the infant shows a playful affect while performing these behaviours.But playful affect by itself does not address the question of symbolic representation sincechildren often display such affect in non-symbolic forms of play.In other research on symbolic play, young children are verbally instructed to performactions on objects that adults see as symbolic (e.g. ‘Give the dolly a drink’ with a doll andcup present), often using objects with which the children are highly familiar. In a taskdesigned to control for familiarity to some degree, Harris & Kavanaugh (1993) presentedyoung children with a verbal script in which there was room for creative symbolic action;for example, ‘Teddy is having a bath. This is Teddy’s soap (offering a yellow block). Showme what Teddy does with his soap.’ Only sometime after their second birthdays werechildren good at this task. It was not possible for children to imitate adult use of specicobjects in this case since the adult did not model the washing action with the yellow block(and presumably the child had not previously seen a block used as if it were soap). But theoriginal identication of the block with soap was accomplished through the child’scomprehension of adult language, not his or her own creative imagination—and appar-ently many children of this age know how to use soap on a doll. Overall, and in a generalway, the inuence of adult symbolic models and verbal scripts on children’s symbolic playis demonstrated by the studies of Slade (1987) and Fiese (1990), who found that children’ssymbolic play during the second year of life was much more complex when playing withtheir mothers than when playing alone—possibly because mothers provide verbal scriptsand symbolic action models during their child’s symbolic play.There is another line of research that creates problems for a symbolic interpretation ofinfants’ object play. In a series of experiments, DeLoache (summarized in 1995) showedyoung children an adult hiding a small doll in a miniature doll house; then showed thema larger but otherwise identical doll in a larger but otherwise identical room; made surethat at least at some level they understood the correspondence between the doll-houseroom and the real room; told them the large doll was hidden in the same place in the realroom as was the small doll in the doll-house room; and then asked them to nd the largedoll in the real room. Until they are 3 years of age—one year and a half after they aresupposedly playing with objects symbolically—children perform very poorly in this task.DeLoache’s explanation for the difculty