How do social conventions develop in children’s play between the ages of 3 and 7 years? The aim of the present research was to improve current understanding of the co-construction of meanings by investigating symbolic uses of objects. Very few studies have focused on the use of objects in social and communicative situations among children beyond the age of 3 years. The purpose of the current thesis was thus to fill this gap, based on the assumption that children's symbolic skills, examined here via the use of objects, develop between the ages of 3 and 7. Three studies were conducted with dyads of 3-, 4-, 5- and 7-year-old children. The same objects were used in each study. The first study consisted of free, unrestricted play. In the second one, the children were invited to play in a humoristic way with objects. The third one was the most constraining in terms of symbolic uses of objects, as the children had to pretend that they were preparing a meal, but were not given the appropriate objects. Results for the unrestricted play study, showed that the 3-year-olds were already very skilled at using objects in a symbolic way. However, the creation of humoristic symbolic uses was less elaborated in the 3- and 4-year-olds than in the 7-year-olds. Finally, for the pretend meal, the 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds developed less complex meanings than the 7-year-olds. Thus, the greater the level of constraint, the greater the difficulty for the 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds in using objects in a symbolic way, and the greater the difficulty in agreeing on new functions for such objects. These results shed new light on the relationship between social conventions, children’s play, object uses and theory of mind in the field of developmental psychology.
