Young children’s comprehension and production of drawings: Age-related changes in two socioeconomic groups

SALSA, ANALIA M.; PERALTA, OLGA A.

Heidelberg

Congreso; 12th International Conference of the EARLI Special Interest Group on Writing; 2010

European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI)

By approximately their third year, children come to understand and produce drawings as symbolic representations (e.g., Callaghan, 1999; DeLoache, 1991; Golomb, 1992). Relatively scant research attention has been given to the influence of social factors in early graphic development. The purpose of this research was to examine 2.5- to 5-year-old children’s comprehension and production of drawings in two socioeconomic (SES) groups. As it has been widely documented, middle-SES parents, compared to low-SES ones, provide their children different experiences with picture books and television, as well as a different language environment (Hoff, Laursen, & Tardif, 2002; Jordan, 2005; Ninio, 1980; Peralta, 1995). These naturally occurring experiences might organize children’s knowledge of pictures, promoting dissimilar developmental patterns in drawing comprehension and production. One hundred and thirty children from middle- and low-SES were given a task with two phases, production (P) and comprehension (C). The P phase examined children’s free drawing and their 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 C phase assessed, in two matching tasks, children’s understanding of their own drawings and the experimenter’s line drawings of the objects.   Middle-SES children comprehended experimenter’s drawings at 2.5 years; at 3.5, children produced figurative drawings in model drawing and they used their own drawings as symbolic representations; figurative production in free drawing emerged at 4 years. In low-SES children drawing comprehension and figurative production appeared later: at 3.5 years children understood the experimenter’s drawings; at 5, they passed both comprehension tasks, but their production was figurative only in model drawing. These results show the same developmental path for both SES groups but with a clear asynchrony in the age of onset of comprehension and production. The findings are discussed in terms of: (1) the specific demands of picture comprehension (own vs. adult’s drawings) and figurative production (free vs. model drawing); (2) the developmental relationships between comprehension and production; and (3) the influence of social experiences on graphic development.