Children's graphical representations and emergent writing: evidence from children's drawings

Previous research on children's drawing and writing focused on children's drawing and symbolization with syllabic languages, providing little information regarding young children's symbolization in drawing with a logo language. This study investigated children's emergent writing by examining qualitatively how children's writing takes place as children are engaged in drawing and how children represent their experiences by means of symbols of different written languages in drawing. The subjects of the study were four girls and six boys aged from four to five in a Chinese class at Austin Chinese School. The data revealed that children's symbolization with conventionally written symbols may take place first through object correspondence or a chain of object correspondence, and then through object correspondence within contextual correspondence toward a whole contextual representation with a mixture of symbolizations with conventionally written symbols and graphical representations, which can be equivalently represented completely with conventionally written symbols.