The Acquisition of Symbolic Skills

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. Toward a Skillful Psychology

   1. Toward a Skillful Psychology

      • Ulric Neisser

      Pages 1-17

3. Waves and Streams of Symbolization: Notes on the Development of Symbolic Capacities in Young Children

   1. Waves and Streams of Symbolization: Notes on the Development of Symbolic Capacities in Young Children

      • Howard Gardner, Dennie Wolf

      Pages 19-42

4. Graphic Skills

   1. Introduction

      • Ellen Winner, Howard Gardner

      Pages 43-45

   2. The Use of Communication Tasks to Investigate Depiction of Spatial Relationships in Young Children’s Drawings

      • Paul Light

      Pages 47-52

   3. Intellectual Realism in Adults’ and Children’s Copies of Cubes and Straight Lines

      • Francis Pratt

      Pages 53-63

   4. The Conservatism of Children’s Drawing Strategies: At what Level does Stability Persist?

      • Peter van Sommers

      Pages 65-69

   5. Children’s Representations in Drawing and Speech: Content, Structure and Context

      • Penelope Jools

      Pages 71-80

   6. Young Children’s Planning Strategies and Early Principles of Spatial Organization in Drawing

      • Claire Golomb

      Pages 81-87

   7. Individual Drawing Styles of Three Children from Five to Seven Years

      • Susan C. Somerville

      Pages 89-96

   8. Children’s Sensitivity to Aesthetic Properties of Line Drawings

      • Ellen Winner, Paula Blank, Christine Massey, Howard Gardner

      Pages 97-104

5. Reading and Spelling

   1. Introduction

      • Uta Frith

      Pages 105-107

   2. Microethology of Spelling Behaviour in Normal and Dyslexic Development

      • S. Farnham-Diggory, Billie Nelson

      Pages 109-121

   3. Phonological Impairment in Italian: Acquired and Developmental Dyslexia

      • Giuseppe Sartori, Remo Job

      Pages 123-130

   4. Interaction of Symbol Systems in Reading

      • Paul A. Kolers

      Pages 131-136

   5. Bi-Alphabetism and Word Recognition

      • Laurie B. Feldman

      Pages 137-147

   6. The Development of Strategies in the Acquisition of Symbolic Skills

      • George Marsh, Peter Desberg

      Pages 149-154

   7. The Development of Phoneme Segmentation Skills in Young Children

      • Margaret Snowling, Dolores Perin

      Pages 155-162

   8. Understanding the Alphabetic System

      • Terezinha Nunes Carraher, Lucia Lins Browne Rego

      Pages 163-170

   9. Patterns of Writing Errors in the Framework of an Information-Processing Model of Writing

      • Philip T. Smith

      Pages 171-177

This book is a selection of papers from a conference which took place at the University of Keele in July 1982. The conference was an extraordinarily enjoyable one, and we would like to take this opportunity of thanking all participants for helping to make it so. The conference was intended to allow scholars working on different aspects of symbolic behaviour to compare findings, to look for common ground, and to identify differences between the various areas. We hope that it was successful in these aims: the assiduous reader may judge for himself. Several themes emerged during the course of the conference. Some of these were: 1. There is a distinction to be made between those symbol systems which attempt, more or less directly, to represent a state of affairs in the world (e. g. language, drawing, map and navigational skill) and those in which the representational function is complemented, if not overshadowed, by properties of the symbol system itself, and the systematic inter-relations that symbols can have to one another (e. g. music, mathematics). The distinction is not absolute, for the nature of all symbolic skills is, in part, a function of the structure of the symbolic system employed. Nonetheless, this distinction helps us to understand some common acquisition difficulties, such as that experienced in mathematics, where mental manipulation of symbols can go awry if a child assumes too close a correspondence between mathematical symbols and the world they represent. 2.

• English
• language acquisition
• language development

• University of Keele, Keele, England

  Don Rogers

• Department of Psychology, University of Keele, Keele, Staffs., England

  John A. Sloboda

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