Treiman, Rebecca, Brett Kessler & Markéta Caravolas. 2009, June. Children’s knowledge about the shapes of Latin letters. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading (SSSR), Boston, MA.
The symbols of a script are similar to one another. One similarity among the Latin letters is that many of them have a vertical stem and an appendage. The appendage is more often on the right, as with <b>, than on the left, as with <d>. We tested the hypothesis that young children learn about this graphic pattern and thus have more difficulty producing <d>-type letters than <b>-type letters.
We examined data from a number of previous studies in which children copied letters and wrote them from memory, and also data from a study in which children wrote words containing /b/ and /d/.
Children were more likely to place the appendage of a <d>-type letter on the right than the appendage of a <b>-type letter on the left. This asymmetry was found in children as young as 4 and 5 years of age. Simner (1984) reported such an asymmetry in a study that is now largely forgotten; the present results show that his findings replicate and generalize.
Young children attend to orientation, implicitly tracking the frequencies of the stem + right appendage and stem + left appendage patterns. Learners of the Latin script, having observed that the former pattern is more common than the latter, tend to guess the more common pattern when their memory for an experienced shape is weak. Statistical learning, previously implicated in the learning of correspondences between sounds and letters, is also involved in the learning of letter shapes.
Treiman, R., Kessler, B., & Caravolas, M. (2009, June). Children’s knowledge about the shapes of Latin letters. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for the Scientific Study of Reading, Boston, MA.
Last change 2009-08-07T11:09:46-0500