Picture Recognition by Preschool Children

Summary

Seventy-one Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test pictures were scaled for consistency of recognition among three-, four-, and five-year-old, middle-class, Caucasian preschool children. The variables of age and sex proved to be significant predictors of the number of pictures recognized correctly by each child. In a further attempt to obtain useful picture recognition norms for this sample of children, recognition scores were examined as a function of age and sex for only highly recognizable pictures (i. e., pictures recognized at least 78 percent of the time by the entire sample). With this sample of pictures the Age × Sex interaction proved to be significant. As the three-year-old males were the source of the interaction, they were eliminated from consideration in the computation of picture recognition values. This procedure resulted in recognition scale values being calculated for 43 pictures found to be recognized and labeled in a consistent manner by three-year-old females and four- and five-year-old males and females. For this sample of pictures, at least 80 percent of the preschoolers gave the same one-word label.