Recent research suggests that graphic motor programs acquired through writing are part of letter representations and contribute to their recognition. Indeed, learning new letter-like shapes through handwriting gave rise to better recognition than learning through typing on a keyboard. However, handwriting and typing do not differ solely by the nature of the motor activity. Handwriting requires a detailed visual analysis in order to reproduce all elements of the target shape. In contrast, typing relies on visual discrimination between graphic forms and does not require such detailed processing. The aim of the present study was to disentangle the respective contribution of visual analysis and graphomotor knowledge. We compared handwriting and typing to learning by composition, a new method which requires a detailed visual analysis of the target without the specific graphomotor activity. Participants composed the target symbols by selecting elementary features from the set displayed on the screen and dragging them in the appropriate position. In four experiments, adult participants learned sets of symbols through handwriting, typing or composition. Recognition tests were administered immediately after the learning phase and again two to three weeks later. Taken together, the results of the four experiments confirm the importance of the detailed visual analysis and provide no evidence for an influence of motor knowledge.

Recent research suggests that graphic motor programs acquired through writing are part of letter representations and contribute to their recognition. Indeed, learning new letter-like shapes through handwriting gave rise to better recognition than learning through methods suppressing the graphomotor activity (e.g., typing or viewing). The present study aimed at further assessing the role of the graphic motor programs in letter-like shape recognition by disturbing the graphomotor activity during learning. We compared recognition performance following normal handwriting to recognition performance following hampered handwriting. Adult participants learned sets of symbols by copying them either with a standard pen or with a hampering writing tool. Recognition tests were administered immediately after the learning phase and again one week later. The results revealed lower recognition accuracy following hampered handwriting than following normal handwriting suggesting a contribution of graphomotor skills in the construction of letter representation. 1. Introduction Reading acquisition is a real challenge for the human brain. When entering in this process, the child has to learn to discriminate and identify graphic shapes, and associate them to phonemes, usually through the medium of handwriting. Then, those graphic shapes will be concatenated to form words which, in turn, will be juxtaposed to form sentences. Reading development has been widely investigated. However, few studies focused on its initial stage, that is, letter recognition. Yet, letter recognition is assumed to be an essential stage in most current models of word recognition given its primary position in the flow of processing (Coltheart,

Recent studies suggest that letter representations are based on a multimodal network linking the graphic motor programs acquired through handwriting to the visual representations. Moreover, the graphic motor programs are assumed to contribute to letter recognition. This assumption is based on the finding that learning symbols through handwriting leads to better recognition than learning through typing. However, in addition to the type of motor activity engaged, handwriting and typing might also differ in other aspects. Indeed, handwriting requires a more detailed visual analysis of the target symbols, which may account for its learning advantage (Seyll et al., 2020). Moreover, different learning methods might differ in attentional engagement. The present study aimed at measuring and comparing the attentional demands incurred by different learning settings. To this purpose, a dual-task probe paradigm was used: participants had to respond as quickly as possible to auditory probes while learning symbols either through handwriting, typing, or composition-a method requiring detailed visual analysis without graphomotor activity. Reaction times to the probes were used as index of the attentional engagement required by the learning methods. Handwriting led to longer reaction times than typing and composition, suggesting that it requires more attention than both other learning methods. Thus, the recognition advantage of handwriting over typing might be partly attributable to attentional engagement during learning. In addition, the advantage of composition over typing, in the absence of differences in the attentional task, confirms the unique importance of detailed visual analysis in symbol memorization.

Based on evidence that learning new characters through handwriting leads to better recognition than learning through typing, some authors proposed that the graphic motor plans acquired through handwriting contribute to recognition. More recently two alternative explanations have been put forward. First, the advantage of handwriting could be due to the perceptual variability that it provides during learning. Second, a recent study suggests that detailed visual analysis might be the source of the advantage of handwriting over typing. Indeed, in that study, 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 detailed 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 variability hypothesis which would predict better categorization after handwriting than after typing or composition.