Developmental mirror-writing is paralleled by orientation recognition errors

Open data: Full raw data and analysis code for this project are available under the first author’s account at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/2qzrg

ABSTRACT

The writing attempts of children often feature mirror-reversals of individual letters. These reversals are thought to arise from an adaptive tendency to mirror-generalize. However, it is unclear whether mirror-writing is driven by mirror-generalisation of the visual letter forms, or of the actions for writing them. We report two studies of the relationship between mirror-writing and the ability to recognize whether a visually presented letter is in the correct orientation, amongst primary and preschool children learning to read and write in English. Children who produced more mirror-writing also made more orientation recognition errors, for uppercase (Study 1, n = 44) and lowercase letters (Study 2, n = 98), and these relationships remained significant when controlling for age. In both studies, the letters more often reversed in writing were also more prone to orientation recognition errors. Moreover, the rates of mirror-writing of different uppercase letters were closely similar between the dominant and non-dominant hands (Study 1). We also note that, in the recognition tasks, children were more likely to accept reversed letters as correct, than to reject correctly oriented letters, consistent with a tendency to mirror-generalize the visual letter forms. In every aspect, these results support a major role for visual representations in developmental mirror-writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Mirror-writing
• mirror-generalisation
• orientation recognition
• statistical learning

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the staff, students, and parents of: Kidzcare After-School Club, Edinburgh, Scotland; Stepping Stones Nursery, Edinburgh, Scotland; Strawberry Hill Nursery, Edinburgh, Scotland; Ennis National School, Ennis, Ireland; Cois Ceim Crèche, Lisdoonvarna, Ireland; and Little Deers crèche, Ennistymon, Ireland. We also thank Mike H. Allerhand for statistical advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

Open data: Full raw data and analysis code for this project are available under the first author’s account at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/2qzrg

1 Study 1 was conducted as an undergraduate research dissertation by AB and ML (Brennan, 2012), and Study 2 as part of a postgraduate research dissertation by KH (Hillary, 2012).

2 The letters q and t were modified for inclusion by adding short rightward “tails” to the bottom of the spine. The letters i, o, v, w and x were excluded as being symmetrical or near-symmetrical, and the letters b, d and p were excluded because the mirror image of each is closely similar to the correct form of another letter.