Young children's comprehension and production of graphic symbols: Examining age-related changes in two socioeconomic groups

SALSA, ANALÍA M.; PERALTA, OLGA A.

Boston, Massachusetts, Estados Unidos

Congreso; 2007 Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development; 2007

Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD)

Pictorial symbols are culturally embedded representations that children learn to master through social interactions. The current research focused on the extent to which the emergence of comprehension and production of representational drawings could be affected by symbolic experience--as a function of age and socioeconomic context. Our research had two goals: (a) to examine 2.5- to 4-year-old children’s performance on a task in which they have to produce drawings of simple objects and to understand their own drawings and the experimenter’s drawings as symbols; (b) to investigate socioeconomic differences on task performance--low SES (LSES) vs. middle SES (MSES). The participants were 80 children, half LSES and half MSES. In each SES group, children were equally subdivided into four age groups: 2.5-year-olds (LSES M = 31 months, MSES M = 31 months), 3-year-olds (LSES M = 36.4 months, MSES = 36.1 months), 3.5-year-olds (LSES M = 42.4 months, MSES M = 42.3 months), and 4-year-olds (LSES M = 48.3 months, MSES M = 48 months). The subjects were recruited from day care centers; LSES children attended public county centers, MSES children attended private ones. The SES status was corroborated through information about education and working status of both parents.    The task used was analogous to the one employed by Callaghan (1999) and consisted of two phases, production and comprehension. In the Production Phase, children were asked to draw a picture of anything they liked (free drawing). Afterwards, they had to make drawings of five objects (model drawing): (1) a ball; (2) a ball with small wooden sticks attached; (3) a ball smaller than 1 and 2; (4) two balls joined with a stick; and (5) a plastic stick. The Comprehension Phase assessed children’s understanding of their own drawings (segment 1), and the experimenter’s drawings of the objects (segment 2). In each trial of segment 1, children were presented with one of their pictures, asked to choose the depicted object from the entire set, and put it down a tunnel. In segment 2, the experimenter dropped one by one the objects down the tunnel, and children were instructed to put them in their corresponding boxes; each box contained an experimenter’s drawing. Preliminary results show that 2.5- and 3-year-old children of both SES groups were unable to effectively produce graphic symbols or to comprehend their own drawings as representations, although they clearly understood the relation between the experimenter’s drawings and their referents. SES differences were found for the 3.5- and 4-year-old groups. MSES 3.5-year-olds succeeded on both comprehension tasks, but they produced representational drawings only when they had to draw the objects. In contrast, LSES children understood the experimenter’s but not their own drawings and failed both production tasks. Finally, at 4 years of age, while all children succeeded in both comprehension tasks and in model drawing, more MSES children were classified as representational drawers in free drawing.