The effects of enhancements on learning and using Blissymbols by normal three-year-old children

The purpose of the present investigation was to study the effects of enhancements on the learning, retention, transfer to the unlearned form, and the use of Blissymbols in forty normal three-year-old children. The subjects learned either 12 standard Blissymbols (SBS) or 12 enhanced Blissymbols (EBS) from List 1 or List 2. The symbols were introduced with short explanations and the number of trials taken to correctly identify 11 out of 12 symbols was noted. In the application phase, they listened to narratives and saw black and white drawings used to establish a communicative task which could be completed through use of a symbol. The number of symbols selected appropriately to complete the communicative act was noted. A week after the acquisition phase, they were tested to find the number of symbols that they could correctly identify. Following the retention task, the number of symbols that could be correctly identified in the untrained form of Blissymbols was determined. The results demonstrated that subjects learning the EBS reached criterion in fewer trials than the subjects learning the SBS and they correctly identified more EBS in the retention task than the SBS subjects. Both groups of subjects performed similarly on the application task, in which there was a large variability for both groups. Subjects who were trained on the SBS did not differ significantly in the number of correct identifications of the untrained EBS, whereas subjects trained on the EBS identified fewer SBS than EBS. The results indicated that normal three-year-olds probably benefit more from an illustration system such as EBS than an orthographic system such as SBS. The implications of the findings and directions for future research are discussed