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

符号素养：幼儿对图形领域中符号与所指对象之间关系的理解的发展

• 批准号: 429220405
• 负责人: Professorin Dr. Anne Deiglmayr, since 1/2023
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Institut für Psychologie (IFP)
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Grants
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2018-12-31 至 2023-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/429220405?language=en
• 关键词: Symbolic; literacy; Young; children; developing

The acquisition of language and – much later – literacy are without doubt two of the most important achievements in cultural learning that young children attain in the first years of life. But even prior to literacy, children are permanently surrounded by symbolic artefacts in the form of iconic signs, pictures and writing. The research proposal presented here comprises three thematically related sets of studies aiming at investigating the process of enculturation that results from this exposure. A first line of work will investigate children’s comprehension of deictic symbols, namely arrows and markers. A second set of studies will test 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 and spatial relationships. A third line of work aims at creating an adaptive test battery investigating preschoolers’ knowledge of conventional signs such as iconic signs, Latin script and Arabic numerals. These tests will in turn be combined with a selection of tasks from study sets A and B and result in a comprehensive within-subjects-investigation on the relations between symbolic experience and children’s ability to spontaneously find meaning in novel signs. All studies will be presented as symbolic object-choice tasks and implemented as computer-based games on touchscreen devices.The project goes beyond previous work on symbolic development by connecting children’s symbolic experience with their ability to interpret signs on an individual level. For the first time in this line of research, subjects’ age will not be elicited in tightly defined groups but in a gradual range from the second to the sixth birthday and, thereby, allow a continuous modelling of development. Whereas previous work has focused almost exclusively on iconicity as a way of creating meaning, the studies outlined above investigate a wide variety of mapping relationships. The computer-based testing will not only facilitate data collection and analysis thoroughly, but also enable international replication and the development of novel variants easily. Taken together, the studies contributing to this project will provide one of the most comprehensive and methodologically coherent investigations of young children’s understanding of symbols in the graphic domain to date.

语言的习得和后来的识字，无疑是幼儿在生命的最初几年在文化学习方面取得的两项最重要的成就。但即使在识字之前，儿童就会永久地被标志性符号、图片和文字形式的象征性人工制品所包围。这里提出的研究建议包括三组主题相关的研究，旨在调查这种暴露导致的文化融合过程。第一项工作将调查儿童对指示符号的理解，即箭头和记号。第二组研究将测试儿童何时能自发地从符号-指称关系建立在象似性、Pars-Prototo以及形状、数字和空间关系的类比的新符号中找到意义。第三项工作旨在建立一个适应性测试单元，调查学龄前儿童对标志性手势、拉丁字母和阿拉伯数字等常规手势的知识。这些测试将反过来与从研究A和B中选择的任务相结合，并导致一项关于符号经验与儿童自发地从新符号中发现意义的能力之间的关系的全面的受试者内部调查。所有研究将以符号对象选择任务的形式呈现，并在触摸屏设备上以计算机游戏的形式实施。该项目超越了以前关于符号发展的工作，将儿童的符号体验与他们在个人层面上解读符号的能力联系起来。在这一研究领域，受试者的年龄将第一次不是在严格定义的群体中得出，而是在从2岁到6岁的逐渐范围内得出，从而允许对发育进行连续建模。前人的研究几乎完全集中在象似性作为一种创造意义的方式上，而上述研究则考察了各种各样的映射关系。以计算机为基础的测试不仅有助于彻底收集和分析数据，而且还可以方便地在国际上复制和开发新的变种。综上所述，对该项目作出贡献的研究将提供迄今为止关于幼儿对图形领域中符号的理解的最全面和方法上最连贯的调查之一。