Pictorality in early picture comprehension

Abstract

[Abstract] The picture space and the young child learning about pictures Picture understanding is a complex competence (in the individual and in culture) that involves knowing, thus having expectations on things. It takes time for the child to learn about the picture sign and also to adults pictorial experiences continue to have effect on the conception of pictorial signs. Picture comprehension applies to perceptual, conceptual and social capabilities and during several years of development, in becoming sign minded, the child will learn to understand pictures. A significant aspect of understanding pictures is of course to differentiate the expression from content; that is one of the basic conditions to learn about sign functions. The notion of pictorality (Sonesson 1989) puts up specific conditions for the iconic relation between expression and content in the picture sign and this should be observed in studies of the development of picture sign in the child. Pictorial iconicity actualizes the question on realism or familiarity of real life in pictures and in my talk at AISS-AIS 2009 I will discuss some implication of this connected to the child’s comprehension of pictures, and to my concern, specifically the photographic picture. Mere recognition of depicted objects are not necessarily indications of picture understanding but the picture as «a guide for action» indicates early pictorial understanding according to DeLoache (1994, 1995). In her retrieval tests the implication is that the child has to understand the iconic relation between the picture and the room depicted to find the hidden target. The tests convincingly show that this can not be done by the child before it is about two and a half years old. But the role of iconicity in the sign relation is not clear. If the picture is exchanged to an iconic scale model the child will not pass the test until it is three years old, but on the other hand if there is no sign relation (to the child) between the two spaces (the scale model and the room) the child finds the hidden toy already at the age of two and a half (DeLoache 1997). Actually to the child, in the second condition, there is only one space which had been changed by «the shrinking machine».