How is emergent writing based on drawing? Analyses of children's products and their sorting by children and mothers

Writing and drawing produced by children 28-53 months old were compared. Israeli and Dutch preschoolers were asked to draw and write, to classify their products as drawing and writing, and to decide what they had drawn or written. Israeli and Dutch mothers classified the products. Scores on a scale for writing composed of graphic, "writing-like," and symbolic schemes showed improvement with age. Recognition of drawings as drawings preceded recognition of writings as writings. Scores on writing and drawing were substantially correlated, even with age partialed out, suggesting (a) that when children start drawing objects referentially, they write by drawing "print" and (b) that progress in object drawing involves progress in drawing print, so that their writing becomes more writing-like. Children unable to communicate meaning by writing spontaneously resort to drawing-like devices, indicating the primacy of drawing as a representational-communicative system.     

Chinese-English biliteracy acquisition: cross-language and writing system transfer

This study investigated cross-language and writing system relationship in biliteracy acquisition of children learning to read two different writing systems-Chinese and English. Forty-six Mandarin-speaking children were tested for their first language (Chinese-L1) and second language (English-L2) reading skills. Comparable experiments in Chinese and English were designed focusing on two reading processes-phonological and orthographic processing. Word reading skills in both writing systems were tested. Results revealed that Chinese onset matching skill was significantly correlated with English onset and rime matching skills. Pinyin, an alphabetic phonetic system used to assist children in learning to read Chinese characters, was highly correlated with English pseudoword reading. Furthermore, Chinese tone processing skill contributed a moderate but significant amount of variance in predicting English pseudoword reading even when English phonemic-level processing skill was taken into consideration. Orthographic processing skill in the two writing systems, on the other hand, did not predict each other's word reading. These findings suggest that bilingual reading acquisition is a joint function of shared phonological processes and orthographic specific skills.     

Regulation of division of labour between cognitive systems controlling action

The brain has evolved a division of labour amongst component systems which link different sorts of processing with precise actions. Debate is over centralized versus decentralized control at different processing levels, from cognitive systems to motor-control systems. With simultaneous activation of alternative expert systems which link (a) picture-processing with drawing and (b) reading with writing, decentralized modelling predicted both the averaging of action-production times and additive effects of neural noise. Such modelling has the advantage of being able to measure the cost of regulation both within and between systems, in a common metric of performance variability. That commonality strengthens the trend to regard the brain as a distributed super-system with a great deal of regulation done towards the output end.     

A dynamic interactive theory of person construal

A dynamic interactive theory of person construal is proposed. It assumes that the perception of other people is accomplished by a dynamical system involving continuous interaction between social categories, stereotypes, high-level cognitive states, and the low-level processing of facial, vocal, and bodily cues. This system permits lower-level sensory perception and higher-order social cognition to dynamically coordinate across multiple interactive levels of processing to give rise to stable person construals. A recurrent connectionist model of this system is described, which accounts for major findings on (a) partial parallel activation and dynamic competition in categorization and stereotyping, (b) top-down influences of high-level cognitive states and stereotype activations on categorization, (c) bottom-up category interactions due to shared perceptual features, and (d) contextual and cross-modal effects on categorization. The system's probabilistic and continuously evolving activation states permit multiple construals to be flexibly active in parallel. These activation states are also able to be tightly yoked to ongoing changes in external perceptual cues and to ongoing changes in high-level cognitive states. The implications of a rapidly adaptive, dynamic, and interactive person construal system are discussed.     

Face processing skills predict faithfulness of portraits drawn by novices

Individuals show astonishing variability in their face recognition abilities, and the causes and consequences of this heterogeneity are unclear. Special expertise with faces, for example in portraitists, is associated with advantages on face processing tasks, especially those involving perceptual abilities. Do face processing skills improve through practice, or does drawing skill reflect pre-existing individual differences? If the latter, then the association between face processing skills and production of faithful portraits should also exist in people without practice in drawing. Two exploratory studies and one follow-up confirmatory study provide support for this hypothesis. Drawing ability of novices was predicted by their performance on face recognition tasks involving perceptual discrimination and visual short-term memory, but not by those that rely more heavily on long-term memory or memory for non-face objects. By examining non-experts, we show that expertise with faces might build upon pre-existing individual differences in face processing skills.     

Range and regression, loudness scales, and loudness processing: toward a context-bound psychophysics

How does context affect basic processes of sensory integration and the implicit psychophysical scales that underlie those processes? Five experiments examined how stimulus range and response regression determine characteristics of (a) psychophysical scales for loudness and (b) 3 kinds of intensity summation: binaural loudness summation, summation of loudness between tones widely spaced in frequency, and temporal loudness summation. Context affected the overt loudness scales in that smaller power-function exponents characterized larger versus smaller range of stimulation and characterized magnitude estimation versus magnitude production. More important, however, context simultaneously affected the degree of loudness integration as measured in terms of matching stimulus levels. Thus, stimulus range and scaling procedure influence not only overt response scales, but measures of underlying intensity processing.     

Effect of Hand Posture on the Temporal and Kinematic Properties of Pointing and Drawing Movements Executed by Healthy Subjects and by a Patient With Primary Writing Tremor

Healthy individuals (n = 6) and a patient with "pure" primary writing tremor executed pointing and drawing movements while adopting different hand postures. The control subjects and the patient exhibited similar kinematics for most conditions. The patient displayed a severe right hand 4- to 6-Hz tremor and prolonged movements only when drawing with his normal hand posture. His tremor was manifested after a ready cue, in anticipation of a go command. The premovement tremor was abolished when the authors simply eliminated the ready cue and instructed the patient to relax and not think about drawing until he heard the go cue. Thus, the patient's writing tremor depended not only upon the writing or drawing act but also upon the hand position adopted and the intent to write, even in the absence of movement. The present results suggest that (a) similar high-level control mechanisms exist for pointing and drawing in healthy subjects and (b) the patient's deficits are compatible with a higher motor defect in central nervous system structures involved in the control of pointing and drawing movements.     

Drawing: its contribution to naming in aphasia

Drawing in aphasia therapy has been used predominately as a substitution for speech or to augment communication when other modalities are non-functional. The value of drawing as a route for facilitating verbal expression has not been a focus of prior research. We compared the usefulness of drawing and writing as compensatory strategies for improving naming in individuals with aphasia. Activation patterns of writing and drawing in healthy adults were examined using fMRI. Clinical results suggest that drawing facilitated naming whereas writing diminished accurate naming responses, and that drawing quality is not relevant to this facilitatory effect. Functional MRI findings revealed strong bi-hemispheric activation of semantic and phonological networks while drawing that may support our clinical findings.     

Temporal invariance for picture-word translation: Evidence from drawing-writing and naming-reading tasks

In two experiments, picture-word processing was investigated using graphic (drawing-writing) and verbal (naming-reading) production tasks. In both experiments, the subjects drew a picture or wrote a word upon presentation of a picture or a word stimulus. Additionally, the subjects in Experiment 2 named a picture or read a word stimulus. Production onset latency was assessed. In both experiments, drawing production was initiated more slowly than was writing production. In Experiment 2, graphic production was initiated more slowly than was verbal production. Equivalent latency increases were found for cross-modality trials (e.g., drawing a picture given a word stimulus) relative to within-modality trials (e.g., drawing a picture given a picture stimulus), independent of stimulus modality (word or picture), production modality (word or picture), or task (graphic or verbal production). These results strongly support a mathematical model which incorporates temporal invariance for pictures and words concerning encoding, cross-modality transfer, and retrieval.     

The Structure of Creativity in Primary Education: An Empirical Confirmation of the Amusement Park Theory

In this study, we explored the structure of pupils’ creativity in primary education following the Amusement Park Theory, by investigating undiscovered linkages between the domains of writing, mathematics, and drawing. More specifically, we examined: (a) whether some domains and general thematic areas are more closely related to each other than to others, (b) whether literacy and mathematical ability are specific underlying traits of creativity in writing and mathematics, respectively, and (c) whether intelligence and divergent thinking are related to creativity in all domains. The sample consisted of 331 Dutch 4th grade pupils. For each research question, a model was analyzed using structural equation modeling. We found creativity in mathematics and creativity in writing to be most similar, followed by creativity in mathematics and creativity in drawing, with creativity in writing and creativity in drawing being least similar. Additionally, we found evidence for several underlying traits (i.e., literacy ability and mathematical ability) and initial requirements of creativity (i.e., intelligence and divergent thinking), none of which were important for creativity in only one domain, and of which only intelligence was important for creativity in all domains. Herewith, our study provides insights regarding the complexity of the structure of creativity in primary education.     

Squaring the round: An unusual progressive graphomotor impairment with post‐mortem findings

Investigations of neurodegenerative disorders may reveal functional relationships in the cognitive system. C.S. was a 63‐year‐old right‐handed man with post‐mortem confirmed Pick's disease with a range of progressive impairments including non‐fluent aphasia, speech, limb, oculomotor, and buccofacial apraxia, but mostly intact intelligence, perception, orientation, memory, semantics, and phonology. During progression, agrammatism in writing with impairments in syntactic comprehension emerged in parallel with an unusual graphomotor deficit in drawing and writing, with an increasing deterioration of graphic short‐term memory. We investigated C.S.'s graphomotor deficit longitudinally using tests of writing and drawing on letters, words, and sentences and drawing to command and copying. We also tested C.S.'s short‐term graphemic buffer experimentally. Analysis showed deficits on selective aspects of graphomotor implementation of writing and drawing, mainly affecting the production of circles and curves, but not short straight lines in drawing and writing, and graphomotor short‐term memory, which paralleled impairments of written syntax and syntactic comprehension. We believe this to be the first detailed analysis of such an unusual progressive impairment in graphomotor production, which may be related to problems with agrammatic agraphia and impairments affecting shared components of cognition reflecting damage to shared neural networks. Alternatively, they may simply reflect the effects of coincidental damage to separate mechanisms responsible for aspects of writing, drawing, and syntactic processing. Longitudinal investigations of emerging deficits in progressive conditions like C.S.'s provides an opportunity to examine the progressive emergence of symptoms in an individual with multiple progressive impairments as they appear and examine putative relationships between them.     

Continuous and Discontinuous Drawing: High Temporal Variability Exists Only in Discontinuous Circling in Young Children

The authors studied whether the drawing variability in young children is best explicable by (a) demands on the explicit timing system, (b) an underdeveloped ability to control limb dynamics, or (c) both. The explicit timing demands were lower in continuous drawing in comparison with the discontinuous task. The authors manipulated limb dynamics by changing the number of joints involved, with line drawing requiring fewer joints than circle drawing. Results showed that young children had high temporal variability in discontinuous circling but not in other conditions. The authors argue that both explicit timing and dynamic complexity of limb control may be determinants of temporal consistency and may thus play an important role in the development of drawing and writing skills in children.     

Continuous and discontinuous drawing: high temporal variability exists only in discontinuous circling in young children

The authors studied whether the drawing variability in young children is best explicable by (a) demands on the explicit timing system, (b) an underdeveloped ability to control limb dynamics, or (c) both. The explicit timing demands were lower in continuous drawing in comparison with the discontinuous task. The authors manipulated limb dynamics by changing the number of joints involved, with line drawing requiring fewer joints than circle drawing. Results showed that young children had high temporal variability in discontinuous circling but not in other conditions. The authors argue that both explicit timing and dynamic complexity of limb control may be determinants of temporal consistency and may thus play an important role in the development of drawing and writing skills in children.     

Differential emergence of representational systems: Drawings,letters, and numerals

This study investigated the process by which the representational activity and knowledge about drawing and letter and number writing emerge in children 21–46 months old. The results revealed that representational activities developed with age through several phases. Beginning at age 2, children produced different marks for different systems, but children under two produced common graphic marks. Representational systems were significantly correlated with developmental processes, but drawing developed faster than letters or numbers with respect to both their production and their classification. Three-year-old children were able to recognize each system correctly in a sample-matching task, but the recognition of each system was not correlated with representational activity. These findings indicate that only after children engaged in graphic production did they begin to make representational distinctions among systems by drawing on their domain-specific knowledge, although alternative explanations can be suggested.     

书写和阅读中的镜像错误及其脑机制

镜像书写是指对单个字母、整个词或者字母串进行反方向书写,当将这些字母或者字投射到镜子上时,这些字母或者字可以被正常阅读。镜像书写现象有时伴随镜像阅读,二者在研究中统称“镜像错误”。非随意的镜像错误已经在儿童以及脑损伤病人身上被发现,并且与利手、基因、智商及书写系统等因素有联系,但对该现象的发生发展及脑机制的解释目前尚不确定。对该现象的研究和解释将有助于我们深入理解文字的加工机制、文字书写的习得以及物体识别系统的加工与组织原则。 本文系统评述了对镜像书写的理论解释,综合各方面研究阐述了镜像书写现象与利手、基因、智商等因素的关系,并探讨了该现象产生的潜在神经机制。     

VISUAL LITERACY AND PRINT LITERACY‐THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS AND POINTS OF CONTACT

The theoretical stance of visual literacy advocates is described as a multi‐sign approach that goes beyond the usual focus on print literacy but does not deal adequately with nonlinguistic signs other than the visual. Semiotics, the general theory of signs, is seen as a more cohesive basis for theory‐building in education. Five areas of overlap between visual literacy and print literacy are discussed: (1) use of graphic organizers as learning aids; (2) study of propaganda; (3) video technologies; (4) use of computers; and (5) children's drawing and writing. The authors state that the points of contact further suggest the need for a semiotic frame of reference. They describe an expansive semiotics‐based model of human experience developed by Deely, but modified by Cunningham and Luk to be a comprehensively multi‐sign model. Suhor's general model for a semiotic theory is presented as a way of depicting relationships among not only linguistic signs and visual signs, but other signs and sign systems in educational contexts