EMERGENCE OF REPRESENTATION IN DRAWING - THE RELATION BETWEEN KINEMATIC AND REFERENTIAL ASPECTS

To identify and characterize early instances in which children attribu te meaning to their drawings, scribbles of 2- to 3-year-olds were exam ined from kinematic and representational perspectives. Scribbles were shown to be composed of smooth-inertial and angular-intentional curves , the former revealing a systematic relation between curvature and spe ed (the 2/3 power law). Children tended to attribute a-posteriori repr esentational meanings (e.g., an airplane) to angular curves and nonrep resentational meanings (e.g., a line) to smooth curves, that they have just finished drawing. They did not do so with reference to scribbles drawn by peers, by themselves in the past, or by the experimenter who imitated their scribbling. Children's attribution of representational meanings increased with age. The phenomenon studied was discussed as a possible precursor of preplanned representational drawing, indicatin g the child's awareness of the symbolic function of a line-standing fo r itself and signifying a referent.