Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Symbol use is considered to be one of the few capacities that are unique to humans. The most influential series of studies on the development of symbolic competence, spearheaded by Judy DeLoache and colleagues, adopted the scale-model task. These studies showed that it is not until three years of age that children display an understanding of symbols, while younger children fail to establish stand-for relations between symbols and their referents. Here we propose that young children's failure in the scale-model task does not reflect a limitation in symbolic competence, but a limitation in mapping depicted discourse episodes onto actual situations. By distinguishing between (reality-directed) representations and (discourse-directed) depictions, we argue that the scale-model task conflates symbolic understanding with an additional operation: linking internally represented episodes to real-world situations.