Do Cavies Talk Analysis

Children all grow up remembering cute animal story books that their parents read to them to make them fall asleep. There is “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Winnie the Pooh”, “The Hare and the Tortoise” etc. Something all these books have in common is the anthropomorphism of these animal characters. Furthermore, these books always seem to teach a lesson or have a moral. This is on purpose, of course, to help educate children while still having fun reading. Nevertheless, it also brings up a pressing question. Does anthropomorphising animals have a positive or negative impact on kids and their perception to animals? An article, written by University of Toronto professor and researcher, Patricia A. Ganea, delves in and answers this question. In her article, “Do Cavies talk? The Effect of Anthropomorphic Picture Books on Children’s Knowledge about Animals”, she analyzes the impact of description of animals in pictures books and how that affects children’s conception and knowledge of animals. …show more content…
In the first study, she made 4 different age groups: 1, 3, 4, and 5 year olds, and then showed them picture books that had realistic pictures of an animal they had never seen before. Then they were split into two groups. The first group heard realistic, factual language; the other group heard anthropomorphized language. In the second study, everything was kept the same, except this time the children saw anthropomorphized pictures of the animals. Results demonstrated that depending on the language used in the books, children had differing tendencies to characterize animals in a human-like way. More specifically, the younger children, who read the anthropomorphic storybooks, were affected in their learning about the animals because of the illustrations. This implicates that anthropomorphizing animals skews learning in children and also influences their knowledge of animals, which is not as positive of an impact as