Southern Peruvian Quechua is an indigenous language spoken primarily in rural communities in the Peruvian Andes. The language includes a syntactic construction, "-paq", that expresses purpose or function, thus providing an opportunity to trace how parents and children with little formal education express teleological concepts. The…

Three- to 5-year-old children's knowledge that pictures have a representational function for others was investigated using a pictorial false-belief task. In Study 1, children passed the task at around 4 years old, and performance was correlated with standard false-belief and pictorial symbol tasks. In Study 2, the performance of children from two…

Examined children's understanding of false belief, representational change, and appearance-reality distinction. Subjects were 34 Junin Quechuan children, 4 to 8 years old. Findings indicated an understanding of the appearance-reality distinction and suggested an improvement with age. Children demonstrated poor understanding of representational…

Patterns of assistance in parent-child dyads were examined by developing measures that could be used to explore the nature of assistance and learner action sequences. A microgenetic approach was adopted in a teaching experiment that may be regarded as a variation of the double stimulation method of L. S. Vygotsky. A second goal was to explore the…