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

Abstract

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...

The universality of symbolic representation for reading in Asian and alphabetic languages

“…Children who are not confident about how print derives its meaning or believe that the picture has some role in attributing meaning to the print will change their answer to this question. The effectiveness of the moving word task to assess these concepts was replicated by Robinson and colleagues by using both standard procedures (Collins and Robinson, 2005) and other variations (Apperly and Robinson, 2003;Collins and Robinson, 2005). Moreover, in several studies, we have shown that bilingual children answer the incongruent question correctly at an earlier age than monolinguals (Bialystok, 1997(Bialystok, , 1999Bialystok, Shenfield and Codd, 2000;Bialystok and Senman, 2004).…”