Toddlers’ referential understanding of pictures

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Abstract

Pictures are referential in that they can represent objects in the real world. Here we explore the emergence of understanding of the referential potential of pictures during the second year of life. In Study 1, 15-, 18-, and 24-month-olds learned a word for a picture of a novel object (e.g., “blicket”) in the context of a picture book interaction. Later they were presented with the picture of a blicket along with the real object it depicted and asked to indicate the blicket. Many of the 24-, 18-, and even 15-month-olds indicated the real object as an instance of a blicket, consistent with an understanding of the referential relation between pictures and objects. In Study 2, children were tested with an exemplar object that differed in color from the depicted object to determine whether they would extend the label they had learned for the depicted object to a slightly different category member. The 15-, 18-, and 24-month-old participants failed to make a consistent referential response. The results are discussed in terms of whether pictorial understanding at this age is associative or symbolic.

Introduction

Pictures are among the most common symbols to which infants and young children are exposed early in life. The majority of children in Western societies regularly encounter pictures in children’s books, family albums, magazines, and so on. Previous research established that by 30 months of age, children are able to use pictures referentially, as symbols for and sources of information about the world (DeLoache & Burns, 1994), but little is known about when in development this capacity first emerges and what limitations might accompany it.

There is abundant evidence that children perceive the similarity between pictures and their referents very early in life. For instance, infants as young as 3 months of age can recognize their mother’s face in color photographs (Barrera and Maurer, 1981, de Schonen and Mathivet, 1990), and by 5 months of age they can detect similarities between and also discriminate between two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) stimuli (DeLoache et al., 1979, Dirks and Gibson, 1977, Rose, 1977, Slater et al., 1984).

There is also abundant evidence suggesting a lack of appreciation of the symbolic nature and use of pictures during the first 2 years. Perner (1991) reported that his 16-month-old son attempted to step into a picture of a shoe. This kind of behavior toward pictures suggests that at this young age children treat pictures as “things of action” rather than as “objects of contemplation” (Werner & Kaplan, 1964). This claim has now been experimentally documented in several studies (Callaghan et al., 2003, Callaghan et al., 2004, DeLoache et al., 1998, Murphy, 1978, Pierroutsakos and DeLoache, 2003, Yonas et al., 2005). When young infants are presented with a highly realistic color photograph of an object, they touch, rub, pat, and scratch at the depicted object and sometimes even grasp at it (DeLoache et al., 1998). Children’s manual exploration of pictures decreases from 9 to 18 months of age (with the largest decrement being between 9 and 15 months) as it is replaced by referential behaviors such as pointing and labeling. The decline in manual behaviors toward pictures may reflect a beginning appreciation that pictures are representations for things other than themselves (DeLoache et al., 1998). It is also possible that at this early stage children simply have firmed up the distinction between the behavioral affordances of 2D and 3D entities but do not yet take pictures as symbols.

By preschool age, children clearly take pictures as symbols in that they can make use of the representational relation between a picture and its referent. For example, 3- and 4-year-olds understand that a drawing can have a different meaning or interpretation depending on the creator’s intention (Bloom and Markson, 1998, Gelman and Ebeling, 1998), and even 30-month-olds can use a depicted situation to form a representation of a real situation so as to guide behavior (DeLoache & Burns, 1994). To explicitly appreciate the representational relation between a picture and its referent, one needs to have the ability to form meta-representations (Perner, 1991) which emerges between 3 and 4 years of age (Leslie, 1987, Perner, 1991), and aspects of explicit reasoning about pictures as symbols continue to develop throughout the preschool and elementary years (e.g., Beilin and Pearlman, 1991, Flavell et al., 1990, Robinson et al., 1994, Uttal et al., 2008, Zaitchik, 1990).

There is a paucity of research on toddlers’ understanding of pictures as symbols. Three recent studies suggest that 15- to 24-month-olds are able to apply information they hear in relation to a picture to its referent (Ganea et al., 2008, Preissler and Carey, 2004, Simcock and DeLoache, 2006). One of these studies (Ganea et al., 2008) showed that 15-month-olds are capable of transferring a novel word from a picture to its referent. After a book-reading interaction in which they learned the label “blicket” for a novel depicted object, they identified which of two real objects was a blicket. Clearly, children learned the mapping between the word and the picture, and they used the similarity between the picture and its referent to choose which object was the blicket. However, this study does not provide strong evidence that children assumed that the word ostensively taught with respect to a picture actually referred to the object. Children may have merely been choosing the best of two bad choices. After all, when shown a bone and a bowl of milk and asked “Which is the dog?,” 3-year-olds will indicate the bone (Markman, 1989), but that does not license the conclusion that they take “dog” to refer to a bone. Similarly, the 15-month-olds may have considered the real blicket as the best of two bad options for the word they learned in relation to a picture of the blicket.

Preissler and Carey (2004) provided a stronger test of whether toddlers who are taught a new word in relation to a picture take that word to apply to the picture’s real-world referent. In their study, 18- and 24-month-olds were taught an unfamiliar label (“whisk”) for a small line drawing of an unfamiliar object (a whisk). Subsequently, they were presented with a pair of stimuli—a real whisk and the same simple drawing for which they had learned the label—and asked to indicate the whisk (i.e., “Can you show me a whisk?”). If children simply associate the word with the picture with which it was paired or take it to refer only to the picture, they should indicate the picture itself because this is actually a choice presented to them. However, if children understand the referential relation between the word and the picture and between the picture and its referent, they should never indicate only the picture as the referent for the word. Rather, they should choose the real object either alone or together with the picture.

The results were striking; of 50 18- and 24-month-olds tested, only 1 selected the picture alone in spite of the fact that they had initially learned the label for the line drawing and had repeatedly experienced the pairing of the label and the small line drawing of the whisk. All of them chose the real whisk, with half selecting the whisk alone and half selecting the real whisk and its picture. These data are consistent with the conclusion that by 18 months of age, children who hear a novel word applied to a picture understand that the word refers to an object in the real world. Of course, adults also use words to apply to pictures of items, and the young children in Preissler and Carey’s (2004) study appear to share this understanding. Of importance is that children did not select just the picture itself. This interpretation is bolstered by the finding that the observed pattern of responding is not inevitable. Using the same paradigm, Preissler (2008) found that children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were making associative mappings among words, pictures, and objects and failing to generalize a label learned for a picture to its corresponding real referent. That is, on the same task, the children with ASD rarely picked the real object alone and more than half of the time picked the picture alone when asked to indicate the whisk from a choice of the picture and a real whisk.

Study 1 had two goals. First, we explored how robust Preissler and Carey’s (2004) findings are by seeking to replicate them in the picture book procedure used by Ganea and colleagues (2008). The procedure used to teach children a novel word in these two studies differs in two important ways. In the picture book procedure, the word learning training was more naturalistic, with pictures for the novel object being labeled in the context of looking through a picture book in which other familiar entities are labeled as well. Also, the pictures are high quality, very realistic photographs rather than highly schematic, black-and-white line drawings. Second, we asked whether children younger than those tested by Preissler and Carey (2004), namely 15-month-olds, perform like older toddlers on this task, demonstrating a symbolic understanding of both words and pictures, or whether they respond as do children with ASD (Preissler, 2008), which would suggest a developmental transition from associative to symbolic understanding in the age range of 15 to 24 months.

Section snippets

Study 1

Study 1 sought to replicate the picture book word learning paradigm of Ganea and colleagues (2008), showing that 15-, 18-, and 24-month-olds will apply a label learned in the context of a picture book interaction to the pictured item. It extended these findings by exploring whether children take the picture that was paired with the word during learning to be a better referent for the word than the actual object itself. Children first learned the novel name “blicket” for a picture of a novel

Study 2

Study 2 asked whether children will prefer a real object as a referent for a new word learned in the context of a picture book when that referent fails to match the pictured entity in some salient way. Children were tested on the same test of pictorial understanding as in Study 1. That is, children again learned the name “blicket” for a novel depicted object. Then they were shown the picture for which they learned the label and a real object that belonged to the same category as the depicted

General discussion

In spite of the fact that infants perceive the similarity between pictures and the objects they depict and also distinguish 2D entities from 3D entities (DeLoache et al., 1979, Dirks and Gibson, 1977, Rose, 1977, Slater et al., 1984), it is still an open question when and how they come to grasp the symbolic function of pictures. Achieving this understanding is a complex developmental process. It is not until 18 to 24 months of age that children prefer upright pictures over inverted pictures (

Acknowledgments

We thank the parents and children who graciously participated. We are grateful to Themba Carr, Kristen Knecht, Jasmine DeJesus, and Ashley Foster for help with data collection. We also thank Carina Wind for help with manuscript preparation. This research was supported by National Science Foundation (NSF) Grant 0440254 (to P.A.G. and J.S.D.) and by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Grant HD-25271 (to J.S.D.).

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