Wpływ mediów na prototypowe myślenie i językowe operowanie schematami przez dzieci w wieku przedszkolnym
The influence of media on prototype thinking and linguistic use of schemes by pre-school children

Author(s): Anna Granat
Subject(s): Sociology of Education
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego
Summary/Abstract: The article proves that media have an influence on prototype thinking and linguistic use of schemes by children of preschool age, thanks to the analysis of utterances made by a group of Lublin’s youngest media audience.The research material consists of children’s verbalisations encoded in fragments of the programme entitled Rozmowy Małe i Duże [Small and Big Talks] (2014), broadcast cyclically on Saturday by the Lublin Radio Centrum, conducted by Monika Zawada. The fragments of the programme, recalled as a case study, concern the figure of Santa Claus. The children answered the questions of the journalist, recreating from memory the appearance and behavior and making a precise description of the character. These verbalisations reproduce the iconographic features contained in the drawings and animations of Coca- Cola advertisements, which proves that children of preschool age categorize a selected element of the world, here an abstract Santa Claus, on the basis of a certain prototype, and this is reflected in their utterances mainly exposing the features, and therefore conceptualized, as a situational structure of „possession” with its subordinates: „operation” and „displacement”. Thus, one can risk a statement that children from the examined group (and not only) think in a „prototypical” manner, choosing a typical exemplar during the conceptualization of a given element of the world. This in turn leads to a conclusion as to how important it is for speaking, and even thinking, to come into contact with media, as they can be a source of prototypes.

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