Digital writing devices associated with the use of computers, tablet PCs, or
mobile phones are increasingly replacing writing by hand. It is, however,
controversially discussed how writing modes influence reading and writing
performance in children at the start of literacy. On the one hand, the easiness
of typing on digital devices may accelerate reading and writing in young
children, who have less developed sensory-motor skills. On the other hand, the
meaningful coupling between action and perception during handwriting, which
establishes sensory-motor memory traces, could facilitate written language
acquisition. In order to decide between these theoretical alternatives, for the
present study, we developed an intense training program for preschool children
attending the German kindergarten with 16 training sessions. Using closely
matched letter learning games, eight letters of the German alphabet were trained
either by handwriting with a pen on a sheet of paper or by typing on a computer
keyboard. Letter recognition, naming, and writing performance as well as word
reading and writing performance were assessed. Results did not indicate a
superiority of typing training over handwriting training in any of these tasks.
In contrast, handwriting training was superior to typing training in word
writing, and, as a tendency, in word reading. The results of our study,
therefore, support theories of action-perception coupling assuming a
facilitatory influence of sensory-motor representations established during
handwriting on reading and writing.
The relation of abstract concepts to the modality-specific systems is discussed controversially. According to classical approaches, the semantic content of abstract concepts can only be coded by amodal or verbal-symbolic representations distinct from the sensory and motor systems, because abstract concepts lack a clear physical referent. Grounded cognition theories, in contrast, propose that abstract concepts do not depend only on the verbal system, but also on a variety of modal systems involving perception, action, emotion and internal states. In order to contribute to this debate, we investigated the semantic content of abstract concepts using a property generation task. Participants were asked to generate properties for 296 abstract concepts, which are relevant for constituting their meaning. These properties were categorized by a coding-scheme making a classification into modality-specific and verbal contents possible. Words were additionally rated with regard to concreteness/abstractness and familiarity. To identify possible subgroups of abstract concepts with distinct profiles of generated features, hierarchical cluster analyses were conducted. Participants generated a substantial proportion of introspective, affective, social, sensory and motor-related properties, in addition to verbal associations. Cluster analyses revealed different subcategories of abstract concepts, which can be characterized by the dominance of certain conceptual features. The present results are therefore compatible with grounded cognition theories, which emphasize the importance of linguistic, social, introspective and affective experiential information for the representation of abstract concepts. Our findings also indicate that abstract concepts are highly heterogeneous requiring the investigation of well-specified subcategories of abstract concepts, for instance as revealed by the present cluster analyses. The present study could thus guide future behavioral or imaging work further elucidating the representation of abstract concepts.
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