ABSTRACT
Early pretend play has long been seen, following Piaget’s inspiration, as part of the child’s emerging symbolic capacity—a symbolic activity that involves three-dimensional props and miming gestures rather than arbitrary signifiers such as words. More recently, the emergence of pretend play in the second and third year of life has taken on a new theoretical significance. There are, I think, two reasons for this. First, it is tempting to argue that a child who is engaged in pretend play, especially a child who is watching a play partner produce a pretend action, must be engaged in some kind of psychological attribution in order to make sense of what the partner is doing.
