Children's understanding of self-symbols: Development and social-context

The present study investigated young children's ability to map from their own body to a representation of their body and examined the role of parent-child conversations about body-representations and past experience with self-symbols in their ability to successfully perform this dual-representation task. Participants were 48 2.5-year-olds and their parents. Children participated in two dual-representation tasks, one in which they were asked to use a self-symbol and one in which they used a symbol for a doll. They also engaged in a storybook reading task with their parents in which the book read contained body parts. As predicted, participants struggled to succeed on the self-symbol dual-representation task. In addition, children whose parents explicitly pointed out the relationship between the children's bodies and the symbols in the storybook were more likely to succeed on the self-symbol dual-representation task. The findings demonstrate that children struggle to grasp connections between themselves and self-symbols, and that the contexts in which they learn about self-symbols are related to their understanding.