Desarrollo simbólico en ni？os peque？os: El rol de la instrucción en la comprensión y el uso de símbolos

early symbolic understanding is influenced by multiple factors, like instruction, physical similarity and experience. the primary interest of this research was to study the impact of adult instruction on young children's understanding and use of the symbolic function of a scale model. the amount of information or instruction that children were given about the relation between the symbol and its referent was varied in complete and minimal instructions. prior experience with the same type of symbol was also varied in order to study learning and transfer effects in early symbolic development. three experiments were conducted using an object retrieval task. all of them required a small space, furnished like a room, and its highly iconic similar-sized scale model (2:1 linear size difference) in order to facilitate the task and test very young children. previous research has shown that 3-year-old children recognize the relation between two small spaces with minimal instructions (deloache, peralta de mendoza & anderson, 1999). moreover, similarity in scale makes 2-1/2-year-olds, who typically fail the model task, able to succeed with full instructions (deloache, kolstad & anderson, 1991). the first study compared the performance of two groups of 2-1/2-year-old children in two similar-scale tasks: one with minimal and the other with complete instructions. the purpose of this experiment was to test if the facilitative effects of size similarity could compensate for less informational support. if this is the case, 2-1/2-year-olds should succeed either with complete or with minimal instructions. in the second study, 2-1/2 and 3-year-old children participated in a minimal instructions similar-scale task. this study examined age differences in children's performance in order to further investigate the interaction between age and instruction in the achievement of representational insight. the third study explored learning and transfer effects as a function of previous instruction