Reconstruction of the communicative meaning of children’s drawings: Types of pictorial production by children

Abstract

This contribution presents an empirically founded typology of children’s drawings oriented toward the reconstructed child’s intent to portray and communicate. In a longitudinal study, the creation process of 1,011 drawings by preschool children (N = 57) was recorded on video. The starting point for the type formation is the analysis of the drawing process, the final product, and the child’s explanations. Three types of children’s drawings can be identified that reflect what the child intends to depict. Thus, in terms of what preschool children communicate graphically and pictorially, a distinction can be made between: 1) Simple representations dominated by the child’s intention to graphically represent and illustrate; 2) descriptions of world knowledge, through which children explicitly express and explain their own ideas; and 3) narrative drawings, in which a (imaginative) story is developed and conveyed. While the first type of children’s drawings clearly predominates among young preschool children, type 2 and in particular type 3 increase over the course of the investigated period, which indicates that a child’s communication by way of and through pictures gains meaning and content as he or she gets older.