| Summary: | We present an analysis of the emergence and development of written speech, its relationship to the oral speech, connections to the symbolic and modeling activities of preschool children – playing and drawing. While a child's drawing is traditionally interpreted in psychology either as a measure of intellectual development, or as a projective technique, or as a criterion for creative giftedness of the child, in this article, the artistic activity is analyzed as a prerequisite for development of written speech. The article substantiates the hypothesis that the mastery of “picture writing” – the ability to display the verbal content in a schematic picturesque plan – is connected to the success of writing speech at school age. Along with the classical works of L.S. Vygotsky, D.B. Elkonin, A.R. Luria, dedicated to finding the origins of writing, the article presents the current Russian and foreign frameworks of forming the preconditions of writing, based on the concepts of cultural-historical theory (“higher mental functions”, “zone of proximal development”, etc.). In Western psychology, a number of pilot studies used the developmental function of drawing for teaching the written skills to children of 5-7 years old. However, in cognitive psychology, relationship between drawing and writing is most often reduced mainly to the analysis of general motor circuits. Despite the recovery in research on writing and its origins in the last decade, either in domestic or in foreign psychology, the written speech is not a sufficiently studied problem.
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