Preschool Children’s Knowledge of Letter Patterns in Print

ABSTRACT

According to a statistical-learning view of literacy development, children begin to learn about the visual characteristics of writing from an early age. We used a delayed copying task to examine U.S. preschoolers’ knowledge about how letters combine with one another. Children (n = 77, mean age 4 years, 8 months) were shown a series of 4-letter strings for 20 seconds each and were asked to reproduce each string after it had been removed from view. Some strings, such as ‹CHED›, included relatively common combinations of letters. In other strings, such as ‹EHDC›, the letters were rearranged so that the strings looked less like English words. When we scored children’s responses for their distance from the presented items, we found better performance on the more wordlike items than the less wordlike items. The results show that preschoolers possess some knowledge about how letters combine, consistent with the statistical-learning view.

Conflict of interest

The authors have no conflicts of interest to disclose.

Ethics approval statement

Ethics approval was obtained from the Washington University Institutional Review Board, which follows the U.S. Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects.

Informed consent

We secured consent from the children’s parents or guardians and assent from the children themselves.

Notes

1. In response to a reviewer’s question about the penalty for substitution errors in the calculation of distance scores, we recalculated the distance scores using different penalty values for substitutions. The correlation between the original scores and the revised scores was.99 when the penalty for substitutions was changed from 1.4, as in the analyses reported in the main text, to 1.2. The correlation was.97 when the penalty for substitutions was changed to 1.0. When we reran the statistical models using the revised distance scores, the results were very similar to those reported.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by NSF Grant BCS-1421279.