Human History of Drawing Into Writing

Humans began using oral language to communicate at least 100,000 years ago. Around 50,000 years later, people started making marks and symbols on cave walls. One of the oldest known artworks, found in an Indonesian cave, shows a wild pig painted using red minerals [1]. Then, only 5,000 years ago, humans started “writing” by making lines in clay, which helped them keep records of trade items. Over time, writing became more advanced. For example, ancient Egyptians used picture-symbols called hieroglyphs to communicate important stories across generations. The hieroglyph representing “house” was a rectangle with an opening like a front door.

Although children naturally learn to speak from an early age and most begin to draw on their own, writing usually needs to be taught. In today’s digital age, handwriting is becoming less important. But neuroscience studies show that practicing writing by hand helps young children remember the specific shape of each letter, which supports reading too [2]. If researchers can understand how kids learn to write, maybe they can design better ways to teach early reading and writing. A strong foundation in literacy benefits children throughout their schooling and later in their careers.

How Does Drawing Relate to Writing?

Previous research has found that young children usually begin drawing with exploratory scribble lines around 2 years old. As they grow older and gain hand muscle and coordination, they can draw more intentional lines and shapes. Later, they combine these shapes, such as a square and a triangle, to make recognizable images like a house. Their drawings are a window into their thinking, including what they notice and what is important to them.

Around this time, children might become interested in writing. They may start drawing wavy lines or smaller shapes that look like writing [3]. They slowly learn that you can write what you say, and read what you write. In other words, between the ages of 3 and 5, young children become more “symbol-minded”—they recognize that lines and shapes are meant to represent things [4].

Of course, turning spoken language into readable letters and words takes a lot of practice. We decided to collect and examine preschool children’s drawings as they began to use writing-like symbols. We hypothesized that five children’s drawing and writing skills would gradually improve across 2 years, but not in a perfectly steady progression. So, we compared the ages at which children reached certain skills. For example, when did they go from scribbling to drawing shapes, and then drawing faces? Or when did they progress from writing one letter to writing their full names? And finally, how did their motivation, interest, and opportunities to practice influence their development?

How We Did the Study

In our pilot study, five children started participating when they were 3 or 4 years old. We collected their drawings and early writing samples about once a week for 6 months to 2 years. Altogether, we collected more than 240 samples from five children, ages 3–5, at one preschool. Over the 2-year study, each child made between 23 and 73 samples.

To track their progress, we used the following measures:

• (a) Human figure drawings (HFDs): the most basic HFDs look like “tadpoles” (a head with two lines for legs or arms). Children commonly draw people, which can be scored using a 12-point coding scheme [5]. With each additional feature (e.g., eyes, arms, hands), the HFD score increases by 1 point.

• (b) Name writing: a child’s name is usually the first word they write, beginning with just the initial letter. This score increases if they form the letters correctly and line them up in the right order (max. 5 points).

• (c) Early writing: as children learn more about the alphabet, they begin to explore letters and words beyond their first name [6]. The scoring ranges from small writing-like marks to recognizable letters and words (max. 9 points) [7].

• (d) Spoken language: children’s oral language abilities, e.g., vocabulary and grammar, grow along with their drawing and writing abilities. Teachers asked, “Tell me about your drawing”, and wrote down a child’s exact response. On each sample, we counted the number of words in the longest phrase—this is known as “mean length of utterance” (MLU).

• (e) Themes: we also created categories to describe the subject of each sample, like “family”, “play”, or “nature”, and identified the most popular ones.

What Did we Find?

From our measurements, all five children’s scores had a pattern of overall growth, but we also saw some decreases followed by rapid increases in their skills.

• (a) Their HFD drawings became more complex over time, so scores generally increased (Figure 1). However, scores could decrease, depending on the purpose of the drawing. For example, one child efficiently drew 41 people in “tadpole” form (Figure 2A) to show all those attending his preschool graduation.

• (b) For name writing, their scores follow a similar pattern as HFDs: a general increase over time, with ups and downs. During a small window of ages–4 years and 9 months and 5 years and 2 months—all five children began writing their names correctly.

• (c) Early writing scores ranged from (3) “writing-like lines and shapes” to (5) “seven or more recognizable letters”—usually a string of random letters (Figure 2B). We did not see evidence of children putting together letters based on their sounds to form words, a skill that often begins later in kindergarten.

• (d) For spoken language, the five children spoke longer and more complex sentences as they grew older. The longest sentence by one of our participants, accompanied his illustration of career plans: “I want to find out about boa constrictors and be an animal doctor when I grow up”.

• (e) The most popular themes were Family/Home, Holiday/ Celebrations, Play/Sports, Nature, and Friends (Figure 3). For preschool students, much of their time is spent with their families and playing with friends, so this makes sense.

What Can We Tell From These Results?

The preschool years are a time of rapid development for children’s spoken language, drawing, and early writing—all of which are symbol systems used to communicate. Past studies looking at only two time points during a school year (fall and spring) missed the broader picture of how children’s abilities grow and change. To better understand how these skills develop, we collected samples more often—weekly or monthly. Thus, we saw children’s symbol development in greater detail.

These five children at a university-based preschool had daily opportunities to draw, explore writing, and verbally describe their work. Each child showed individual style and creativity. Overall, their markings became more intentional, meaningful, and symbolic as they got older, which other studies have also found. With only five children, we cannot say our results apply to all preschool children.

Many questions sparked our interest: For instance, how does one draw a person eating or swimming, a ball bouncing, or write a message to Santa? Such challenges using a marker on a flat piece of paper require a lot of problem solving. Also, this study was done during the COVID-19 pandemic, and everyone in the classroom wore masks. However, no drawings pictured a person with a mask. We are not sure why—maybe children did not think a mask was an “essential” part of the human figure?

Future Directions

Our new study has a diverse group of 100 participants, some as young as 1 or 2 years old. We are following these children across 3 years to better see patterns and differences in their drawing and writing development. Over a third of the children speak multiple languages, some with different written symbols, like Korean, Chinese, and Hebrew. Studying their growth will contribute insights into teaching dual language learners, who are a large and increasing population.

We have also introduced a digital component: collecting samples from two classrooms using tablets with a drawing app. Now we can record a child’s drawing process in real time, including where they begin on the screen and the step-by-step progression of their drawing. Finally, we are using artificial intelligence (AI) to score 20% of our 7,000+ samples.

Our main goal for the DEW study is to advance research and education related to early literacy development. Our findings might help in identifying and designing ways to support children who are struggling in reading and writing. There is much more to learn about how children go from drawing scribble lines to writing shared symbols in order to communicate in a global world.

Glossary

Hieroglyph: ↑ An ancient writing system that uses pictures and symbols to represent words, syllables, or sounds. The ancient Egyptians carved or painted these symbols on clay, stone, and paper.

Literacy: ↑ The ability to read, write, speak, listen, and understand information well enough to learn new things, communicate with others, and handle everyday life in the world around you (National Literacy Trust, UK).

Pilot Study: ↑ A small, early version of a study done to test ideas and methods before doing a larger research project with more participants.

Measures: ↑ Also called measurements, a framework to carefully observe or give scores to data, like the detail level of a drawing, or the number of recognizable letters a child writes.

Dual Language Learners: ↑ Children who are learning two or more languages: usually a home language and an additional language at school.

Artificial Intelligence (AI): ↑ A technology that helps machines learn from data, spot patterns, and solve problems. AI does not “think” like humans, but can do tasks such as identifying images or sorting information.

Conflict of Interest

The author(s) declared that this work was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

AI Tool Statement

The author(s) declared that Generative AI was not used in the creation of this manuscript.

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