Form and meaning in the development of writing

The purpose of this study was to tap preschoolers’ conceptions about the representational meaning of writing via their notation of sentences having different syntactic and semantic relationships. 60 Hebrew speaking children attending nursery school and kindergarten were individually interviewed. Each child dealt with 10 different pairs of sentences; a written sentence and a spoken one. The semantic relationships between the sentences were different in each pair i.e., identity; total difference; redundancy; entailment and inconsistency. Each time the written sentence was read, first by the experimenter and then together with the child. Then, with the written sentence still in front of him, the child was presented with the spoken sentence and asked to write it down.

Children’s writing-procedures became increasingly differentiated reflecting the relationships between the written model and the spoken sentences. A link was found between the type of semantic relationships and children’s writing-procedures. Results are discussed in terms of level of metalinguistic knowledge involved in writing.