CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

This work explores young children´s comprehension of the referential function of pictures. In a picturebook reading session we taught 30 and 36-month-old children a new word (pompe) to label a non-familiar object. Then, we introduced the non-familiar object and its picture asking children to point to the pompe. Children were assigned to two experimental conditions in which picture-object perceptual similarity was manipulated: photographs and line drawings. Results revealed that children showed referential responses to photographs but associative ones to line drawings. No age differences were found. Results reveal that although very young children establish referential relations between words,pictures and objects, these relationships continue to be weak and are strongly affected by perceptual similarity. Findings are contrasted with results obtained by current research in the field and discussed in terms of the particularities of the design and materials in each case employed.