This study investigates children's metarepresentational competence with regard to listening to and making sense of simple sonic stimuli. Using diSessa's (2003) work on metarepresentational competence in mathematics and sciences as theoretical and empirical background, it aims to assess children's criteria for representational adequacy of graphical…

Third and fifth grade children (average age 8.6 and 10.6 years) and adult participants were tested with printed words of varying length in a new on-line identification task (the luminance increment paradigm, LIP) and a speeded naming task. Effects of general length (length in letters, phonemes and syllables) were shown to decrease systematically…