Hayes Raffle Vaucelle, C., Wang, R., and Ishii, H.

Abstract

Children in our culture are accustomed to creating people and things and places---with implied context---in their drawings. Since the first days they draw, parents will ask "who is that? Where are they? What are they doing?" From early on, children have learned through drawing to provide the information necessary for an audience to understand the story that is going on in their drawing. Conversely, learning how to contextualize an oral or written story in the absence of images is a much slower learning process for children, and children's ability to use language to communicate when and where their story takes place is considered a milestone in literacy development [Snow 1983].