Tested 6- and 8-year olds' ability to construct irony in story-completion tasks. Found that story stems based on familiar events, for which structured, detailed representations are available, facilitated irony more than did less-familiar activities, supporting irony as a metarepresentational skill. Young children's irony manipulated cognitively…

Three experiments (sorting and theory-of-mind tasks) examined whether, for preschoolers, a particular form of reasoning applied to theory-of-mind and a set of problems requires understanding of mental states. Found that advances in theory of mind, card sorting, and causality depend on ability to switch judgments across conditions; reasoning by…

Tested children with apparatus that dropped balls through clear or opaque interwoven tubes. Found that older children could solve configurations with greater number of tubes than younger children. Success with clear tubes did not transfer to opaque tubes. Significantly, errors were consistently directed to location directly below ball's last seen…

Four studies examined preschoolers' use of the cue of action initiation to infer another's desired goal. Found that differences in action initiation play an increasingly important role in 3-year-olds' mentalistic explanations of action, and that this development may be related to other critical changes occurring in their developing theory of mind.…