ABSTRACT
Visual scene segmentation counts among the essentials of cognitive and linguistic development. The common grounds of visual perception and incipient language become strikingly evident in young children’s amazing perceptive and cognitive skills. This shows in the sifting of gestalt principles (e.g., proximity, similarity, continuity) from increasingly complex visual scenes and in the search for coherence in the (linguistic) input. This chapter views early perceptual skills, language development and children’s reproductions of drawings against the background of gestalt psychology, developmental neurobiology, and the dynamics of pattern formation. Special emphasis is laid on the interplay of neural growth and the extension of focus in the organization of the input. Data from extensive empirical studies with mono- and bilingual children illustrate the dynamics of pattern generation. Samples of children’s drawing skills (age range 3;ii-6;6) are matched against linguistic data assessed in long-term spontaneous speech studies and psycholinguistic tests (age range 1;5-3;3; 4-10 years). The results show that various systems share common principles and yet display specific evolutionary patterns. Different time scales in the development of cognitive systems suggest a link between brain growth spurts and the dynamics of scene segmentation and pattern formation.
