Early Child Development and Care Vol. 181, No. 4, May 2011, 425–444 ISSN 0300-4430 print/ISSN 1476-8275 online © 2011 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/03004430903442001 http://www.informaworld.com From scribbles to meanings: social interaction in different cultures and the emergence of young children’s early drawing Giuliana Pinto a *, Beatrice Accorti Gamannossi a and Catherine Ann Cameron b a Department of Psychology, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy; b Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada Taylor and Francis GECD_A_444561.sgm (Received 18 September 2009; final version received 27 October 2009) 10.1080/03004430903442001 Early Childhood Development and Care 0300-4430 (print)/1476-8275 (online) Original Article 2009 Taylor & Francis 00 0000002009 GiulianaPinto pinto@psico.unifi.it The cultural components of drawing allow one to consider it a symbolic form of cultural communication. The behavioural and cognitive mechanisms involved in the cultural transmission of symbolic communications are situated in an environment embedded in cultural–historical features that should be taken into account, as they give rise to variations in socio-cultural practices. The aim of the present paper is to provide evidence of a range of different pathways through which the acquisition of drawing emerges in divergent cultural contexts. This work stems from the international Day in the Life (DITL) project. From the DITL dataset countries, we show how family members in seven (in Thailand, Peru, Italy, Canada, the UK, the USA, and Turkey) expose their 30-month-old child to opportunities for experiencing drawing. We focus on the way the children are given the opportunity to draw, their spontaneous uptake, and on the different modalities through which they discover relationships between drawings and the objects they represent. In the different interactions observed, we confirm the omnipresence of situations that child development research has identified as promising for drawing-skill development. In all contexts, drawing materials, shared child–adult attention, dyadic asymmetrical relationships, and reciprocal involvements are found to be present. Keywords: development; drawing; early childhood; socio-cultural practices; symbolic systems Introduction It is largely acknowledged in developmental psychology that young children’s initial forays into drawing tend to consist primarily of scribbles. Once children, at least those in western cultures, begin to produce representational drawings, they often rely upon generalised “tadpole” figures to represent both human and non-human forms (Golomb, 1992). Eventually, children create recognisable images that represent partic- ular human and animal referents. Three-year-olds often rely on the tadpole form, which typically consists of a circle containing facial features and some lines radiating out from the circle, to represent people as well as animals. Four-year-olds begin to differentiate animals from humans via horizontal orientation and adding some distin- guishing features, such as whiskers on dogs and tails on fish. Over the next two to three years, children draw conventional forms of animals, increasingly using single *Corresponding author. Email: pinto@psico.unifi.it