The Performance of Prekindergarten Children on Representational Tasks Across Levels of Displacement.

Nelson's (1996) experiential theory and the Situational-DiscourseSemantic (SDS) model of Norris and Hoffman (1993,1997, in press) guided this investigation. The SDS model was used to establish predictions regarding the representational difficulty of each of the task conditions. Subjects were 32 fouryear-old children enrolled in four prekindergarten programs located within a small city in southern Louisiana and represented both lower and middle SES populations. The tasks required subjects to represent knowledge of the bedtime routine, ranging from personal enactments with props through generation of stories and event scripts for hypothetical situations. Performances were analyzed for content in terms of event structure or story structure. The linguistic forms of the performances were analyzed for MLU, completeness, and complexity. Subjects were predicted to perform higher on lower level tasks. The view of representational abilities as existing along a continuum of displacement levels as proposed by the SDS model was largely supported by the analysis of content scores. Partial support resulted for the prediction that children would produce utterances with more completeness and complexity for tasks rated as lower levels of the SDS model. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Experiential theory and the SDS model propose that the ability to represent information displaced from the self and the present time and space is mediated by language experience with caretakers in direct and indirect literacy experiences. Subjects having higher levels of home literacy experience, as measured by a caretaker questionnaire, were predicted to perform higher on higher level tasks. Subgroups were formed according to caretaker reports for higher and lower amounts of home literacy experience. Performance scores for the two groups were compared. Results largely supported this prediction as the higher literacy experience group scored higher on all tasks with significant differences for 5 of the 7 tasks on content and for only the highest level task on form. Content and form scores for all subjects on the 7 representational tasks were also correlated with the home literacy experience scores. Correlations for individual performances and home literacy experience generally supported predictions made by the SDS model as high correlations were found for the highest level tasks. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. INTRODUCTION The representational abilities of children are manifested in their play, drawings, conversations, or experiments. This ability to cognitively represent knowledge emerges gradually throughout childhood. Piaget proposed that representation emerged in stages, with qualitatively different types of representational thought emanating with each new cognitive equilibration (Piaget, 1936/1952,1937/1954). But other researchers challenged the concept of stages, viewing representational abilities to be far more situationally governed and based on experience (Bruner, 1964,1966; Borke, 1975; Anderson & Cuneo, 1978; Peterson & McCabe, 1985, Baillargeon, 1987, Baillargeon & DeVos, 1991). In this view, greater representational ability would be demonstrated in more situationally familiar contexts. Consequently, contexts such as daily routines would elicit better representational abilities than unfamiliar events. Similarly, the presence of situational artifacts (i.e., objects or scenes associated with the event) would elicit better representational abilities than unsupported contexts of use (Masterson & Kamhi, 1991; Link, 1995; Scott, 1997). This study examined the representational abilities of preschool-age children under seven different representational conditions. These conditions ranged from highly familiar and contextuaiized to unfamiliar or hypothetical and unsupported by context (i.e., decontextualized). The levels of the SituationalDiscourse-Semantic (SDS) model (Norn's & Hoffman, 1993,1997, in press) were used to establish predictions regarding the relative representational difficulty of each of the conditions.