Social experience scaffolds early comprehension and production of representational drawing

SALSA, ANALÍA M.

Montreal

Congreso; 2011 Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD) Biennial Meeting; 2011

Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD)

By approximately their third year, children come to understand and produce drawings as symbolic representations. At 2.5 years, children use drawings to guide symbolic responding in search and matching tasks (DeLoache, 1991; DeLoache & Burns, 1994; Harris, Kavanaugh & Dowson, 1997). Even the most rudimentary representational drawing is not typically created by children until around 3 years of age (Cox, 1992; Golomb, 1992). Liben (1999) offered suggestions about the mechanisms by which this graphic competence may be facilitated, suggestions that have recently received some empirical support. These mechanisms include exposure to many different kinds of representational media and to alternative representations of the same referent (Troseth, Casey, Lawver, Walker & Cole, 2007); experience in creating graphic representations or learning about specific graphic techniques (Callaghan & Rankin, 2002); and parental social guidance (Szechter & Liben, 2004). In consequence, symbolic and social experiences may scaffold the emergence of symbolic comprehension and production. Symbolic and social experience might be influenced by socioeconomic status (SES). Middle SES parents, compared with low SES ones, provide their children different experiences with books and television, as well as a different language environment (Hoff-Ginsberg, 1991; Hoff, Laursen & Tardif, 2002; Ninio, 1980). These naturally occurring experiences might organize children’s knowledge of symbolic representations differentially, promoting dissimilar developmental patterns in graphic competence. The purpose of the research we present here was to examine young children’s comprehension and production of representational drawings as a function of SES (middle versus low). The participants were 112 children, half middle SES and half low SES. In each SES group, children were equally subdivided into four age groups: 2.5, 3, 3.5, and 4 years of age. In the low SES, it was necessary to observe a group of 5-year-old’s children (N = 18). 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, in a matching task, children’s understanding of their own drawings and the experimenter’s drawings of the objects. Middle SES children comprehended experimenter’s drawings at 2.5 years; at 3.5, children produced representational drawings in Model Drawing and they used their own drawings as symbolic representations; representational production in Free Drawing emerged at 4 years. In low SES children drawing comprehension and representational production appeared later: at 3.5 years children understood the experimenter’s drawings; at 5, they passed both comprehension tasks, but their production was representational 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. These findings are discussed in terms of the influence of social experience on graphic development.