Letter identification is not a trivial task: the same letter can look very different depending on font or case. Indeed, consider how easily you can read a handwritten note from someone whose handwriting you have never seen before. Thus, we must learn to extract the regularities that determine letter identity and to ignore irrelevant aspects of the visual input.
In preschool classrooms, letters tend to be taught through sight and sound activities such as flashcards, with little time devoted to learning to write letters. However, a growing body of research suggests that practice writing letters facilitates letter-learning. In an article published in Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Li and James (2016) (PDF, 354KB)opens in new window sought to determine why this might be the case.
Five-year-old children were taught the names of four Greek symbols in one of six learning conditions. Three conditions were based on sight-and-sound learning: studying symbols presented in a single typed font, in multiple typed fonts, or in handwritten form. The other three conditions involved motor output: copying symbols, tracing typed symbols, or tracing handwritten symbols.
Although children required more time to complete the learning tasks that required motor output, learning time was not correlated with any outcome measures. Learning was measured using a four-alternative-forced-choice task completed pre- and post-training, where children had to choose between an upright learned symbol, a rotated learned symbol, a geometric shape, and an unlearned Greek letter.
Finally, children were tested on their ability to generalize learned symbol knowledge to new, more variable instances using a card-sorting task with typed and handwritten flashcards.
Overall, children showed evidence for symbol learning, and performed better on the four-alternative-forced-choice test after learning. However, performance on the card-sorting task depended on learning condition, such that children who viewed a single typed font or traced typed symbols were less successful than children in the other learning conditions.
Importantly, these were the only two learning conditions in which symbols were always presented in the same, single font. Thus, children benefited from exposure to more diverse and variable examples, regardless of whether these were experienced in the context of sight-and-sound methods or writing practice.
So why does handwriting practice facilitate letter-learning? The authors suggest that handwriting practice provides a natural way to increase the variability of encountered examples, especially in children who are just learning to write and therefore show even more variability in their motor output.
A child's ability to identify letters is a strong predictor of future reading success. Although these results do not point to an overall superiority of handwriting practice for learning symbols in children, they do suggest that classroom instruction should move away from flashcards and tracing tasks with prototypical letters, and instead aim to expose children to diverse examples. Handwriting practice just happens to provide an easy means to that end.
Citation:
Li, J. X., & James, K. H. (2016). Handwriting generates variable visual output to facilitate symbol learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145(3), 298–313. https://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xge0000134
Note: This article is in the Basic / Experimental Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Basic / Experimental Psychology topic area.