Cues to Artist’s Intention that Facilitate 24-month-old Children’s Understanding of Drawings

Three studies investigated the effects of pedagogical cues to artist’s referential intention on
2- and 2.5-year-old children’s understanding of drawings in a matching task without verbal labels support. Results showed that pedagogical cues, the combination of the artist’s eye gaze while she was creating the drawings (non-linguistic cues) and verbal descriptions about her graphic actions (linguistic cues), enabled 2-year-olds to match highly realistic line-drawings with referents. However, 2-year-olds’ performance was not influenced to an equal degree by non-linguistic and linguistic cues; verbal scripts appeared to be the critical aspect of pedagogical demonstration even with pre-drawn pictures. By contrast, at 2.5 years of age, children inferred the artist’s intention when comprehending drawings in the absence of pedagogical cues. This research illustrates the potential power of pedagogical demonstration to communicate referential intentions in the pictorial symbol domain.