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

毫无疑问，语言的习得以及后来的识字能力是幼儿在生命最初几年里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，儿童也永远被标志性符号、图片和文字等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个主题相关的研究，旨在调查的过程中，从这种接触的结果。第一步是研究儿童对指示符号的理解，即箭头和标记。第二组研究将测试儿童何时能够自发地在新的符号中找到意义，这些符号的符号-指涉关系是基于象似性，pars-pro-toto，以及形状，数量和空间关系的类比。第三条工作线旨在创建一个自适应测试电池，调查学龄前儿童对传统符号，如图标符号，拉丁字母和阿拉伯数字的知识。这些测试将依次与从研究集A和B中选择的任务相结合，并导致对象征性经验与儿童自发地在新符号中找到意义的能力之间的关系进行全面的受试者内调查。所有的研究都将以符号对象选择任务的形式呈现，并在触摸屏设备上以基于计算机的游戏形式实现。该项目超越了以往关于符号发展的工作，将儿童的符号经验与他们在个人层面上解释符号的能力联系起来。在这一系列研究中，受试者的年龄首次不会在严格定义的群体中得出，而是在从第二个到第六个生日的逐渐范围内得出，从而允许对发展进行连续建模。虽然以前的工作几乎完全集中在象似性作为一种创造意义的方式，上述研究调查了各种各样的映射关系。基于计算机的测试不仅有助于全面收集和分析数据，而且还可以方便地进行国际复制和开发新变体。总之，有助于这个项目的研究将提供一个最全面的和方法上连贯的调查幼儿的理解符号的图形域的日期。

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.