Examining Factors for the order in which preschool children learn to write alphabet letters

1. Examining Factors for the order in which preschool children learn to write alphabet letters Cynthia Puranik, Yaacov Petscher, & Christopher Lonigan - ABSTRACT RESULTS Age 3: CV, VC, and No Sound Letters were associated with a low probability of correctly writing the letter. Vowels were significantly easier. When the letter was first in the student’s name, there was a significantly higher probability of writing it correctly compared to when it was not. Age 4: Similar results as Age 3 Age 5: First letter in name was only significant effect Variance Explained Age 3: 8% of letter variance Age 4: 6% of letter variance Age 5: 9% of letter variance • METHOD • Participants • Total N = 415 preschool children • From 59 different private and public child care centers in a moderate-sized city in north Florida and western Pennsylvania. • Mean age of 52.53 months (SD = 8.9; range 26 - 65 months) • Ethnicity: White- 62.7%, Black/AA- 28.9%, Asian-3.4%, Hispanic- 1.9%, Other-2.9% • 47% male, 53% female • There were 148 three-year olds, 134 four-year-olds, and 133 five-year-olds. • Measure • Letter writing: To assess letter-writing skills, children were asked to write each of 26 letters of the alphabet in a fixed random order. The examiner said the name of the letter and the children were asked to write the letter. • Data coding • For each child, the data was coded: • to indicate if a letter was the first letter in the child’s name (FLIN) • if the letters occurred in the child’s name (LIN). • To account for letter order (LO), each letter was assigned a number of 1 to 26 based on its order in the alphabet sequence. For example, the letter A was assigned as 1 and J was assigned a 10. • To account for letter type, letters were coded as consonant-vowel (CV; B, C, D, G, J, K, P, T), vowel-consonant (VC; F, L, M, N, R, S), no-sound letters (NSL; Q, H, X, Y, W), and vowels (A, E, I, O, U). • To code for textual frequency, each letter was assigned a number from 1 to 26 based on Jones and Mewhort (2004) report regarding frequency of occurrence of upper case letters in print. This study was undertaken to examine the influences on how children learn to write the letters of the alphabet. Specifically, the present study addresses children’s knowledge of letters by predicting the probability of a child knowing how to write a letter by examining five hypotheses simultaneously. Research indicates that both extrinsic and intrinsic factors influence the development of letter names and letter sounds. Extrinsic factors refer to indirect influences that originate from outside and concern the social influences of learning (e.g., Justice et al., 2006). These would include influences at home and school and the type of print children are exposed to. Intrinsic factors refer to the essential nature of the letters themselves and might help to describe differences between letters; for example, the phonological structure of a letter. Research indicates that letters that contain their names (CV letters such as ‘t’ and ‘b’) are learned before letters that do not contain their names (e.g., ‘m’, ‘s’) (McBride Chang, 1999; Treiman, Tincoff, & Richmond-Welty, 1997). HYPOTHESES TESTED Hypothesis 1:First letter of name. Children’s names have a special salience from them and substantial evidence indicates that the first word a child learns to write is his or her first name (Bloodgood, 1999; Bothe-de Vries & Bus, 2008; Puranik & Lonigan, 2011; Treiman & Broderick, 1998). Hypothesis 2: Letters in name. Children demonstrate an own-name advantage when beginning to learn letter names and letter writing. Justice et al. (2006) reported that children 1.5 times more likely to know the names of the letters (other than the first letter) in their names compared to letters that were not in their names. Hypothesis 3: Letter order. According to this hypothesis, letters occurring early in the alphabet sequence are more likely to be learned before letters that occur later on in the alphabet sequence because when teachers generally introduce letters they tend to do so in an ABCD manner. Hypothesis 4: Textual frequency. Frequency appears to be an important factor in spoken word learning (e.g., Hoff & Naigles, 2002; Goodman, Dale, & Li, 2008; Naigles & Hoff-Ginsberg, 1998; Rice, Oetting, Marquis, Bode, & Pae, 1994). Similar to the acquisition of oral language, preliminary evidence indicates that the frequency with which children see letters in print may influence the order in which they learn letters (Pollo, Kessler, & Treiman, 2009; Puranik, Petscher, & Lonigan, submitted). Hypothesis 5: Letter type. According to this hypothesis, children learn the names of letters earlier for those letters that have their sound in their name (CV letters such as b, t, g) than letters that do not have the sounds in their names such as VC letters (e.g., m, l, s), Vowel letters (a, e, i, o, u) and no sound letters (NSL; h, y). • CONCLUSIONS Analysis A generalized linear cross-classified mixed effects model was used to examine how variance in responses could be partitioned to differences between students and differences between letters. Individual models were run for age 3-age5 students to account for the developmental sensitivity to variance components in the generalized model. CONTACT INFORMATION Cynthia Puranik: cpuranik@pitt.edu; Yaacov Petscher: ypetscher@fcrr.org; Christopher Lonigan: lonigan@psy.fsu.edu ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work was supported, in part, by a grant the Institute of Education Science, US Department of Education (R305A090622)