Symbolic literacy: Young children’s developing understanding of the relation between symbol and referent in the graphic domain

Children’s developing understanding of symbols in language, gesture or symbolic artefacts is central to their enculturation and demonstrates the growth of cognitive capacities that define the human mind. However, even prior to formal education, children may be highly competent readers of symbols in the graphic domain. This project investigated the development of symbolic literacy within the preschool years with three sets of thematically related studies. The first set of studies was devoted to the understanding of deixis in the graphic domain, that is, of reference via arrows and markers. A first investigation (N = 72) established that children already understand arrows and markers at 34 months. A second study (N = 96) employed a test condition with an ambiguous triangle cue pointing to one item while being closer to another. We predicted that young children would prefer the marker interpretation and would only later give primacy to a directional interpretation. Indeed, up until 37 months, children chose the option closest to the cue, whereas children from 50 months onwards systematically preferred to follow its direction. A follow-up study (N = 48) established that by 41 months of age, children are so skilled in reading arrows that they can generally read nonconventional asymmetric shapes as directional cues in a simple object-choice-tasks. A second set of studies tested when children can spontaneously find meaning in novel signs whose symbol-referent relationship is based in iconicity, pars-pro-toto, and analogies in shape, number, size, and spatial relationships. Three studies comprising a total of 288 participants and twelve conditions traced the developing understanding of seven symbol-referent relationships between the third and seventh year of live. Results clearly indicate that children are first able to interpret direct representations, and then come to understand other relations that are less and less iconic. By fifty months, children´s ability to identify analogies has become so pronounced that they can spontaneously comprehend cues in any of the categories outlined above. In order to better understand the interplay of cognitive abilities and knowledge of conventional symbols in the individual development of children’s symbolic capacity, we constructed a test battery based on the most reliable items from the second set of studies along with tasks evaluating children’s knowledge of words, their knowledge of conventional symbols, and their pragmatic abilities. This final study (N = 224) highlights the central role of pragmatics in the development of symbolic literacy across the domains of speech and graphic representations. Together with a further study (N = 144) comparing children’s performance in match-to-sample tasks with communicative and non-communicative framing, and a study (N = 96) investigating children’s ability to interpret movement in graphic representations, this project provides one of the most comprehensive and methodologically coherent investigations of young children’s understanding of symbols in the graphic domain to date.