Inelegant Variation

A recent conversation reminded me of Fowler's concept of "elegant variation" that today is known as "inelegant variation"--the practice of substituting an awkward word or phrase to avoid repeating a word or phrase in a sentence. In Fowler's day, "elegant" was a pejorative term. Since the word now has a positive meaning, his concept has been renamed. See this headline from Austin American Statesman that Garner cites: "Victim's Family Can Witness Death of Loved One's Killer." The reader must stop to consider whether "Victim" and "Loved One" refer to the same person. (Garner recommends dropping "Victim's.")

Revisiting Vygotsky and the Forbidden Colors Task

It is fun to read the work of researchers who revisit studies conducted by big-name people in our field of learning theory. In this case someone as returned to study conducted by Leontiev that Vygotsky interpreted.

Recently I came across an article that challenges Vygotsky's conclusions about Leontiev's Forbidden Colors Task--conclusions that are included in Mind in Society. In the Forbidden Colors Task, children of different ages were asked 18 questions in four separate tasks. In the first task, the children were asked the questions; in the second, the children were told two color words that they could not use in their answers. The third task included the same constraint as the second task, but the children were also given nine colored cards to aid them. The fourth task was similar to the third.

What were the results? In short, the elementary-aged children made the same number of errors with and without the cards. Older children (8-9 years) had fewer errors when they could use the cards. Vygotsky believed that the results showed three separate stages of development: in the preschool stage, the child could not organize the external tools (the colored cards) to help with the task. In other words, their answers were not mediated by the external tools. Older children were able to use the external tools to mediate their answers, and adults could use internal tools (psychological tools) to mediate their answers.

When van der Veer replicated the study, he added an instruction phase after the fourth task.
The instruction was in both how to use the cards and how to use verbal strategies in the tasks (such as giving "funny" answers, as in the sky is pink). The number of errors severely dropped for all children after the instruction phase, but a closer analysis showed that there was no relation between errors and card use. Thus, the verbal strategy played a an important role. Van der veer also concluded that it is probably wrong to assume that the older children exclusively relied on the external tools--they most certainly brought internal strategies to the task as well. So does this call into question the simplicity of the non-mediated - external tools - internal tools trajectory of development? It is possible that the children in Leontiev's study relied more on the cards because they weren't given instruction in verbal strategies, but Van der veer seems to believe that Leontiev's study was probably not a good one for studying internalization....