Graphic syntax and representational development
International audience; This chapter focuses specifically on the relationships between syntax and cognitive development, particularly representational development. Vinter, Picard and Fernandes promote the take-home message that changes in drawing behaviour during development result from changes in the size of the cognitive units or mental representations used to plan behaviour, and in the capacity to manage part-whole relationships. This hypothesis is first illustrated by reviewing studies in which children's adherence to the graphic rules when they copy elementary or complex figures is assessed. The authors also examine children's syntactical behaviour at a more global level, characterizin…
Representational flexibility in children's drawings: Effects of age and verbal instructions
This study aims to investigate representational and syntactical flexibility in children's drawing behaviour, and the extent to which changes introduced at both representational and syntactical levels are related to age or can be induced by contextual manipulations. A Deletion task required three age groups of 5-, 7- and 9-year-old children to draw objects that had been rendered partially invisible, thanks to magic transformations. Two different verbal instructions about what was to remain visible in the objects, and two different objects, one regularly and one non-regularly drawn, were designed to investigate contextual sensitivity in children's representational and syntactical behaviour re…