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Abstract EN

The study of children’s understanding of the world around them, which is naturally formed through the various stages of their development, is one of the most important topics of developmental psychology.

Understanding pretense as the ability to understand expressions, signs and symbolic gestures of others as well as its association with a number of capabilities whose appearance coincides with it, such as language, mental representation, symbolic understanding, and mind theory, is a fertile field for researchers in the development of social knowledge.

The current research proposes the idea of revealing the children’s understanding of the pretending as well as trying to answer several questions worthy of research through which the research acquires its importance through presenting the literature and theories that it deals with and providing additional indicators weighting one of the opinions presented.

Thus the current research aimed to identify: 1- Children’s understanding of pretense according to two variables: a - Age (2-5; 2-3-5, 3-4) year.

b - Gender (males - females).

2-There are statistical differences in the children's understanding of pretense according to two variables: Gender (males-females).

The current research sample included (300) a child from government nurseries in Baghdad Governorate, at ages (2-5, 2-3-5, 3-4) year, and by (60) children for each age group divided equally between males and females.

The researcher adopted Harris tool (Harris,et al, 1993) which was designed to measure four basic components for understanding pretense, namely (the requirement of pretending, causal forces, stopping or disrupting objective truth, an open or exposed causal chain).

The researcher has verified the psychometric properties of the instrument by extracting the validity and reliability, and the stability factor has been reached (0,84).

The researcher used a number of statistical methods such as the T- test for one sample, analysis of bilateral variance with the reaction and equation of Alpha Cronbach, and a Shyfih test for dimensional comparisons.

The current research reached the following results: 1- Children can understand pretending by the age of (3) year.

2- The understanding of pretending develops with growing old.

3- There is not an effect of gender in understanding pretending.

and the researcher concluded a set of recommendations and suggestions.