Your thoughts on symbols
Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2011 9:34 pm
This one came up the other day in a conversation. To me it's interesting how a symbol such as the check mark can have different meanings.
Just throwing in a bit of develomental information here. The young child develops the ability for symbolic thinking around age 4 years. This is, in part, the ability to interpret symbols such as the one you posted and is a prerequisite skill for reading.
You will see this in a child in multiple ways. I'll give you a few...
1. Using an object to symbolize another object. For example, holding up a banana and talking into it as if it were a phone. The banana becomes the temporary symbol for a phone.
2. Reading environmental print. Here's a few examples:
All of those symbols serve the same purpose as a letter or numeral symbol. When a child can do both of those things (use symbolic thinking in play and interpret symbols such as those symbols they see in environmental print), they are ready to comprehend that a letter is a symbol for a particular sound and eventually, that the letter symbols and their sounds, when strung together, mean a particular word.
So, one can say that the human ability to use symbols in meaningful ways, begins on or around age 4 years.
:-)