This study investigates how Mandarin Chinese-speaking children use Mandarin Chinese, a language lacking tense markers, to represent characters’ speech in their story narratives. Eighty participants, from three to six years of age, completed an elicited narrative task based on a wordless picture book. The representing forms and signals that they employed in representing activities were assessed. The results showed a significant age-related increase in the overall use of speech representation by the cohort of children. Regarding representing forms, direct representation exhibited its expected dominance among all age groups, and its presence in children’s narratives grew significantly with age. Concerning representing signals, shuō ‘say’ was the most prevalent across all ages and susceptible to significant age effects, and, with advancing age, children’s representing signals expanded from single verbs to more complex syntactic constructions. In addition, no significant gender effects were observed regarding the representing forms or signals that Mandarin-speaking children used.

The paper investigates the relationship between the forms through which products are represented and the outcomes of evaluations made by observers. In particular, the study focuses on perceived affordances of creative designs, meant as the capability of capturing original elements and corresponding functions, for products presented through static images or videos. Also thanks to the use of Eye Tracking, the experimental results show how dynamic effects that involve salient aspects of products, as well as creative features, are critical to observers’ capability of capturing design intentions.