Three experiments examined limitations in 5-year-olds' understanding of mental and linguistic representations. Findings indicated relatively poor performance on task involving two labels for one object, requiring children to treat another's knowledge as representing only some feature of its real referent: dice but not eraser. There were parallel…

Findings of four investigations involving five through seven year olds suggest that, even though children can make relatively accurate judgments of their knowledge states, they tend to overestimate their competence when assessing their knowledge in relation to performance on a task. (RH)