How children turn objects into symbols: A cultural learning account

From around their second birthdays young children engage in activities in which one physical object or situation is used to "stand for" another. For example, 2- and 3-year-olds pretend that an object is something different, they create and interpret simple drawings of objects and situations, and they use simple maps, pictures, videos, and scale models to locate things in real space. These activities in which one thing or situation is used to point beyond itself to another are all uniquely human activities and may be said to involve the capacity to symbolize. In this chapter we approach children's developing symbolic competence in the wider context of their cognitive and social development. The development of understanding symbolic actions with objects, we claim, is best considered as part of children's developing social understanding more generally, and the development of performing symbolic actions with objects is most fruitfully viewed as a process of cultural learning, based on children's nascent under- standing of intentional action and on cultural scaffolding. In our review of empirical findings, we focus on three ways in which children act symbolically with objects: pretend play, drawing, and using three-dimensional objects as symbols. We also review some findings from development in the second year of life, before children become proficient symbolizers with objects, as a way of grounding children's symbolic activities in their cultural activities more generally.