AUTHOR=Seyll Lola , Content Alain 

TITLE=Letter-Like Shape Recognition in Preschool Children: Does Graphomotor Knowledge Contribute?

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 12 - 2021

YEAR=2022

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.726454

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2021.726454

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=Based on evidence that learning new characters through handwriting leads to better recognition than learning through typing, Longcamp and colleagues (2008) proposed that the graphic motor plans acquired through handwriting contribute to recognition. More recently two alternative explanations have been put forward. James (2017) proposed that the advantage of handwriting is due to the perceptual variability that it provides during learning. Our own work (Seyll et al., 2020) suggests that the detailed visual analysis might be the source of the advantage of hand-writing over typing. Indeed, handwriting and composition –a method requiring a detailed visual analysis but no specific graphomotor activity– led to equivalent recognition accuracy, both higher than typing. The aim of the present study was to assess whether the contribution of de-tailed visual analysis is observed in preschool children and to test the variability hypothesis. To that purpose, three groups of preschool children learned new symbols either by handwriting, typing, or composition. After learning, children performed first a four alternative recognition task and then, a categorization task. The same pattern of results as the one observed in adults emerged in the four alternative recognition task, confirming the importance of the detailed visual analysis in letter-like shape learning. In addition, results failed to reveal any difference across learning methods in the categorization task. The latter results provide no evidence for the varia-bility hypothesis which would predict better categorization after handwriting than after typing or composition.