This study compared 3 groups of kindergarten children (49 Ss in all) in learning names for the letters "b" and "d." An Attention-Consistent Motor (A-CM) group received pretraining in attending to the directional difference between the letters and making consistent motor responses to each letter. An Attention-Inconsistent Motor (A-IM) group received similar attention pretraining, but made inconsistent motor responses to each letter. An Irrelevant-Control (Ir-C) group received attention and motor response pretraining to color stimuli. Performance of the 3 groups on the letter-naming transfer task showed the 2 attention groups superior to the control group. No significant performance differences were associated with the motor response variable.Developmental studies (Gellerman, 1933;Rice, 1930) indicate that young children discriminate form at an earlier age than they respond to changes in orientation or inversions of plane figures. Newhall (1937) found there were differences in discrimination performance associated with types of inversions. He showed that children observed up-down inversions consistently as early as 3 years of age. The left-right inversion, by contrast, was responded to inconsistently as late as 5 years. Davidson's (1935) findings with letter inversions were similar in trend to Newhall's. Davidson reported that up-down inversions illustrated by "q" and "d" were discriminated by more than 50% of the kindergarten-aged children. At the same age, left-right inversions, illustrated by "b" and "d", were discriminated by less than 10%.
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