Pedagogical Cues to an Artist’s Intention in Young Children’s Understanding of Drawings

Three studies investigated the effects of pedagogical cues to an 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 (nonlinguistic 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 nonlinguistic and linguistic cues; verbal scripts appeared to be the critical aspect of pedagogical demonstration even with predrawn 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.