Performance of Children with Typical Development When Reading and Interpreting Graphic-Symbol Sequences^*

Abstract

In order to understand a sequence of graphic symbols as sentences, one must not only recognize the meaning of individual symbols but also integrate their meaning together. In this study children without disabilities were asked to perform two tasks that presented sequences of graphics as stimuli but that differed in the need to treat the symbols as a sentence (i.e., with evidence of relationships among the individual symbols): a “reading” task (transpose the symbol sequence into speech), and an act-out task (demonstrate the meaning of the symbol sequences using puppets). The participants, aged 3 (n = 18), 4 (n = 36), 5 (n = 27), and 6 (n = 23) years, all succeeded on the reading task, but the younger groups were much less successful than the older groups on the act-out task. The children were more likely to pass the act-out task if they used conjugated rather than infinitive verb forms in their spoken responses on the reading task. In the younger age groups, children who used conjugated verb forms had higher receptive vocabulary scores. The findings suggest that being able to reproduce a sequence of symbols does not guarantee that the symbols are treated as a sentence. The inclusion in the study of children who were able to respond using speech, permitted observation of two types of responses (conjugated versus infinitive verb forms) that revealed different levels of understanding of graphic symbol sequences.

Keywords::

• Graphic symbols
• Symbol sequences
• Syntax
• Verb forms

Aknowledgements

This research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (grant awarded to the second and third authors). The manuscript is based on a study conducted by the first author as part of an undergraduate research project under the direction of the second and third authors.

Declaration of interest: The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

1. Trudeau et al. (2010) proposed using the terms interpretation and construction when referring to graphic symbol utterances, and reserving comprehension and production for speech, in order to recognize that the terms are not fully equivalent across modalities and to maintain a distinction without having to specify the modality at each mention. There is no assumption made, however, regarding equivalence (or lack thereof) of the cognitive processes that may underlie or contribute to input and output in the two modalities. Along the same lines, the term sentence is used here when referring to spoken words or graphic symbols that together form an organized semantic-syntactic unit, and utterance is used when the unified nature of the words or symbols cannot be assumed.