Symbolic Functioning in Very Young Children: Understanding of Pictures and Models

DeLoache, Judy S.

doi:10.2307/1131174

Cited by 302 publications

(249 citation statements)

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“…In the only study we know of examining infants' learning from picture books, Ganea and DeLoache (2005) found that 18-month-olds, and some 15-montholds, extended a novel label learned for a novel depicted object to the real object. Moreover, from around 24 to 30 months of age, young children can use a photograph to locate a toy hidden in a room (DeLoache, 1991;DeLoache & Burns, 1994;Suddendorf, 2003).Early on, infants' and toddlers' ability to relate pictures to their referents is relatively tenuous and affected by iconicity, that is, by the degree of similarity between depiction and real object. For example, 9-month-olds engage in more manual exploration of highly iconic pictures (photographs) than less iconic pictures (drawings) (Pierroutsakos & DeLoache, 2003).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Get the picture? The effects of iconicity on toddlers' reenactment from picture books.

Simcock¹,

DeLoache²

2006

Developmental Psychology

128

111

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What do toddlers learn from everyday picture-book reading interactions? To date, there has been scant research exploring this question. In this study, the authors adapted a standard imitation procedure to examine 18-to 30-month-olds' ability to learn how to reenact a novel action sequence from a picture book. The results provide evidence that toddlers can imitate specific target actions on novel real-world objects on the basis of a picture-book interaction. Children's imitative performance after the reading interaction varied both as a function of age and the level of iconicity of the pictures in the book. These findings are discussed in terms of children's emerging symbolic capacity and the flexibility of the cognitive representation.Keywords: picture books, reenactment, imitation, iconicity, symbols Picture-book reading plays a prominent role in young children's daily activities. From around 1 year of age, many children in Western cultures spend considerable time engaged in joint picturebook reading with their parents (DeBaryshe, 1993;Gelman, Coley, Rosengren, Hartman, & Pappas, 1998;Karrass, VanDeventer, & Braungart-Rieker, 2003;Payne, Whitehurst, & Angell, 1994). In a recent large-scale survey, parents of preschool children reported that they own dozens of children's picture books and spend around 40 min a day in picture-book interactions with their children (Rideout, Vandewater, & Wartella, 2003).Most of the existing research on picture-book reading with toddlers has focused on the nature of the interaction and the relative contributions of parents and children to it (Fletcher & Reese, 2005). Parents use picture books as a teaching event: They point to and label pictures (Murphy, 1978;Ninio & Bruner, 1978), ask questions and provide feedback (DeLoache & DeMendoza, 1987;Ninio & Bruner, 1978), emphasize taxonomic category relations (Gelman et al., 1998), and elaborate on story lines (DeLoache & DeMendoza, 1987;Hayden, Reese, & Fivush, 1996). We know little, however, about what young children learn from these interactions and whether they relate the contents of books to the real world.Although it is widely assumed that toddlers learn a great deal about the world from picture-book interactions, there is reason to believe that this may be a relatively challenging task for very young children. Understanding that pictures in a book may represent real objects requires some level of pictorial competence-the ability to perceive, interpret, and understand the nature and use of pictures (DeLoache, 2002;DeLoache & Burns, 1994;DeLoache, Pierroutsakos, & Troseth, 1996). The development of full pictorial competence takes place gradually over several years.Very young infants can discriminate pictures and objects (DeLoache, Strauss, & Maynard, 1979;Slater, Rose, & Morrison, 1984), but they show little evidence of comprehending a picture as a representation of another entity (DeLoache, Pierroutsakos, Uttal, Rosengren, & Gottlieb, 1998). Nine-month-olds, for example, manually explore pictures in books; they feel, rub, and even...

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confidence: 99%

Get the picture? The effects of iconicity on toddlers' reenactment from picture books.

Simcock¹,

DeLoache²

2006

Developmental Psychology

128

111

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“…Later, at around three years of age, children become able to use scale models and simple maps in the same manner (DeLoache, 1991;Liben, 1999;Marzolf & DeLoache, 1994; see also MacConnell & Daehler, 2004). Subsequently, children reveal understanding that photographs or drawings can represent their referents as they looked in the past rather than as they are currently (Robinson, Nye & Thomas, 1994;Thomas, Jolley, Robinson & Champion, 1999;Zaitchik, 1990).…”

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confidence: 99%

Can one written word mean many things? Prereaders’ assumptions about the stability of written words’ meanings

Collins

Robinson

2005

Journal of Experimental Child Psychology

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Pre-readers' assumptions about the stability of written words' meanings Abstract Results of 3 Experiments confirm previous findings that in a moving word task prereaders aged 3-5 years judge as if the meaning of a written word changes when it moves from a matching to a non-matching toy, for example when the word 'dog' moves from a dog to a boat. We explore under what circumstances children make such errors, and identify new conditions under which children were more likely correctly to treat written words' meanings as stable: When the word was placed alongside a non-matching toy without having previously been alongside a matching toy; when two words were moved each from a matching to a non-matching toy; and when children were asked to change what print said. Under these conditions children more frequently assumed physical forms had stable meaning, as they do with other forms of external representation.Keywords: Representation; Meta-language; Written words; Symbols 3 Assumptions about the stability of word meanings Can one written word mean many things?Pre-readers' assumptions about the stability of written words' meanings Over their preschool and early school years, normally developing children show increasing mastery at handling relationships between external representations of various kinds and their referents. A relatively early achievement at around two and a half years is the ability to use photographs, drawings or video recordings to locate hidden objects (DeLoache, 2004;DeLoache & Burns, 1994;Troseth & DeLoache, 1998;Liben, 1999).Later, at around three years of age, children become able to use scale models and simple maps in the same manner (DeLoache, 1991;Liben, 1999;Marzolf & DeLoache, 1994; see also MacConnell & Daehler, 2004). Subsequently, children reveal understanding that photographs or drawings can represent their referents as they looked in the past rather than as they are currently (Robinson, Nye & Thomas, 1994;Thomas, Jolley, Robinson & Champion, 1999;Zaitchik, 1990). In a typical task, children see a drawing or a photograph of an object, and features of the object are then changed. Many 3-year-olds judge as if they believe that the representation (out of sight) has physically changed to stay in match with its real referent. By 4 to 5 years of age few children make this error.Later still, by the age of around 6 to 7 years, children can evaluate as inadequate utterances which under-specify their intended referents (Flavell, Speer, Green & August, 1981;Robinson & Robinson, 1982;Apperly & Robinson, 1998) Furthermore, because written words have conventional generic meaning, we might find theoretically interesting differences in the developmental course of children's mastery of this form of representation in comparison with the others summarized above.In the hiding tasks mentioned children use a picture of a particular room; in standard false picture tasks the picture represents a particular aspect of the world; in tasks involving ambiguous utterances the speaker refers to a specific referent from...

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“…According to De Loache (1991), when someone looks at a picture, he will focus on the representation not the picture as an object. Therefore, although very young children might not appreciate photographs as much as adults, photographs and pictures are found to be much easier for young children to understand and to relate with the real object (see DeLoache, 1991).…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Preschool Children Preferences on their School Environment

Sahimi

2017

ajE-Bs

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Children and adults have different views and preferences about the environment around them. Digital camera pictures offer a tangible documentation and representations of children"s perception and preferences regarding their school environment. This study is to identify children"s photography selection and preferences on the school environment, both indoors and outdoors. This study was conducted on 19 preschoolers (n=19) of age 4 and 5 using the project based approach. The children were given a digital camera and were asked to take pictures of things in their school environment that they really liked. Their photographs were analyzed to see their overall preferences about their school environment.

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Symbolic Functioning in Very Young Children: Understanding of Pictures and Models

Cited by 302 publications

References 16 publications

Get the picture? The effects of iconicity on toddlers' reenactment from picture books.

Get the picture? The effects of iconicity on toddlers' reenactment from picture books.

Can one written word mean many things? Prereaders’ assumptions about the stability of written words’ meanings

Preschool Children Preferences on their School Environment

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