Early development of notational activities and knowledge : developmental factors

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This study investigated the early development of notational activities and knowledge, and the factors influencing this development in 2 6-year-olds, using production (drawing and writing), picture-book comprehension, classification, and letter-reading tasks.1. The results of the production task showed that, despite results from previous studies demonstrating domain-specific notational knowledge in children older than 4, even 2-year-olds produced different marks for drawing and writing and had domain-specific knowledge. However, because our study also indicated that notational activities and knowledge developed with age and that drawing preceded writing developmentally, we sought an alternative explanation for these findings.2. In the picture-book task, we revised the Concepts about Print test (Clay, 1979) to design tasks for evaluating the developmental process of children's acquiring procedural knowledge of picture books and of reading, letter notation, and story comprehension. Althou … More gh two-year-old children had the procedural knowledge for using a picture book and understood the story, their procedural knowledge of reading and knowledge of letter notation increased with age and correlated significantly with their ability to read letters.3. In the classification task, we examined the developmental process of understanding 13 types of perceptual-formal/orthographic information. The results revealed three stages in the development of understanding this knowledge : (1) 4-year-olds can understand perceptual-formal types of information, (2) 5-year-olds understand spatial, orientation, and word-component information, and (3) after age 6, an understanding of Japanese orthographic information occurs. The partial correlations were significant between the letter-reading ability and the knowledge of spatial, orientation, and word components for 5 year olds, and between the letter-reading ability and Japanese orthographic knowledge for 4-or 6-year-olds. These findings suggest there are several factors related to the development of notational activities and comprehension. Less