Our results show that children engage in pretense and in imitation of pretense during the first half of the second year of life. First, we examined children’s pretense during two maternal conditions:one in which mothers were asked to play naturally and the other in which mothers were specifically instructed to pretend. Our findings revealed that the frequency of child pretense behaviors varied as a function of age and condition. Across both play situations with mothers, and accounting formaternal pretense rates, children’s spontaneous pretense actions became more frequent with age. Incontrast, we found no significant changes with age in children’s imitation of maternal pretend acts.Interestingly, children engaged in similar amounts of pretense during the two maternal conditions,while they imitated maternal pretense more frequently during ME than during MN. These result scorroborate the finding that maternal scaffolding behaviors vary as a function of condition. That is,mothers engaged in more pretense and used more verbalizations during ME than during MN. Althoughit has been argued that imitation of pretense may be too difficult for young pretenders (Rakoczy et al.,2005), our results suggest that pretend play with mothers increases children’s imitation of others’pretense.