Early Understanding of Pictorial Representations: The Role of Socioeconomic Context

SALSA A. Y PERALTA, O.

Denver, EEUU

Congreso; Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in child Development- SRCD; 2009

Society for Research in child Development- SRCD

Pictures are one of the first symbolic artifacts infants and young children must learn to master. In Western societies, most children “read” picture books with their parents and look at family photographs and television images on a daily basis. In such interactions young children learn the nature of pictorial representations and their conventional functions and uses. The present research examined 2.5- to 3.5-year-old children’s understanding of photographs and drawings in two socioeconomic (SES) groups--low-SES and middle-SES. Prior studies reveal that by 2.5 years of age children interpret pictures symbolically, relating a picture to what it depicts (DeLoache, 1991; DeLoache & Burns, 1994; Harris, Kavanaugh, & Dowson, 1997). However, there has not been systematic examination of whether pictorial symbol understanding varies across different socioeconomic groups. It is widely documented that middle-SES parents, compared with low-SES parents, provide their children richer interactions with books and television, as well as a different language environment (Anand & Krosnick, 2005; Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991; Jordan, 2005; Peralta de Mendoza, 1995). Our hypothesis was that these naturally occurring experiences might impact young children’s understanding of pictures as symbols. In this research a simple matching task with two conditions, photograph and drawing, was used. It has been demonstrated that iconicity affects children’s ability to relate depiction and real object (Callaghan, 2000; Simcock & DeLoache, 2006). In the photograph condition we tested two low-SES groups (2.5- and 3-year-olds). In the drawing condition we tested three low-SES groups (2.5-, 3-, and 3.5-year-olds). Two middle-SES groups (2.5-year-olds) were tested as control groups. There were 14 participants in each age group. The task had five choice trials. The experimenter dropped one by one five different objects constructed with balls and sticks; the children were asked to select which one of five boxes was the correct one to put the object dropped by the experimenter. In each trial the children had to choose one box out of five. Each box contained either a highly realistic color photograph (photograph condition) or a black-and-white line drawing (drawing condition) of each one of the five objects. The results revealed a dramatic failure by low-SES 2.5-year-old children to match the pictures with their appropriate objects in both photograph (31%) and drawing (37%) conditions, while middle-SES 2.5-year-olds were quite successful in both conditions (85% and 70%, respectively). The performance of low-SES 3-year-old children was much better with more iconic than with less iconic pictures. They performed above chance with photographs (73%) but at chance with line drawings (30%); the greater iconicity of photographs probably improved performance. In the drawing condition, low-SES children succeeded at 3.5 years of age (88%), a whole year after the middle-SES group did. The results of this research expand our understanding of the emergence of pictorial symbolism showing an interaction between social factors and iconicity in the performance of very young children.