Handwriting Legibility and Its Relationship to Spelling Ability and Age: Evidence From Monolingual and Bilingual Children

Abstract

Studies of the relationship between spelling and handwriting concur that spelling skills influence the dynamic processes of handwriting. However, it remains unclear whether variations in spelling ability are related to variations in the legibility of handwriting, how important spelling skills are relative to the amount of handwriting experience afforded by an individual's age and number of years of schooling, or to what extent this relationship may be task-and orthography-specific. We investigated these questions in a study comparing spelling and handwriting legibility in a group of N = 127 Welsh-English bilingual children matched in age and number of years of schooling to a group of N = 127 English-monolingual children, as well as to a group of N = 127 younger, English monolingual children matched to the bilingual group in spelling ability. All groups completed the Spelling and Handwriting Legibility Test (SaHLT) and a broader battery of literacy measures. The bilingual children were found to have poorer handwriting legibility than same age peers, and in some cases, than their younger, spelling-ability peers, suggesting that spelling ability, more so than amount of handwriting experience and years of schooling impacts handwriting legibility. This was corroborated in a series of multi-group path models, where all children's handwriting was predicted by spelling ability more strongly than by age, and, the effect of spelling generalized across two different spelling tasks in all groups. Finally, bilingual children seemed to draw on general (Welsh) as well as on orthography-specific (English) knowledge when handwriting in English.

How Do Spelling, Handwriting Speed, and Handwriting Quality Develop During Primary School? Cross-Classified Growth Curve Analysis of Children's Writing Development

“…However, it is essential to take an interest in legibility since poor handwriting can have far-reaching consequences for children's self-esteem and academic achievement (Feder and Majnemer, 2007;Medwell and Wray, 2007). The few studies focusing on legibility used criteria that are commonly related to letter formation and to spatial organization within and between words (e.g., unusual letter shapes, size fluctuation, bad letter alignment, abnormal space between letters; Graham et al, 2006;Caravolas et al, 2020). Such criteria allow identifying children who have graphomotor difficulties, leading to illegible handwriting like in the case of developmental coordination disorder or, to a lesser extent, dyslexia (Prunty and Barnett, 2017;Di Brina et al, 2018;Downing and Caravolas, 2020).…”

“…Since then, studies have demonstrated that spelling and graphomotor processes have influenced each other during the course of writing, challenging this vision of independent processes (Kandel and Perret, 2015;Palmis et al, 2019;Gosse and Van Reybroeck, 2020). However, little is known about the concurrent development of transcription skills, and our understanding of how spelling and handwriting influence each other is limited (Caravolas et al, 2020). Even though the current literature contains studies focused on either children's spelling or handwriting, collecting data that consider both transcription skills together is necessary to understand their relationship.…”

“…Even though the current literature contains studies focused on either children's spelling or handwriting, collecting data that consider both transcription skills together is necessary to understand their relationship. Moreover, although it is a major aspect of handwriting, legibility has only rarely been investigated in typically developing children (Gosse et al, 2018;Caravolas et al, 2020). Indeed, the great majority of studies on handwriting reported results based on the dynamic parameters of handwriting (i.e., speed, pausing).…”

Prevalence and Cognitive Profiles of Children With Comorbid Literacy and Motor Disorders

“…Handwriting legibility. We assessed handwriting legibility using the protocol from the SaHLT (Caravolas et al, in preparation; see also Caravolas et al, 2020). Children's handwritten responses to the sentence dictation task were scored on four dimensions as follows: (a) Letter Formation, which measures the child's accuracy and consistency in producing letters; (b) Letter Spacing, which assesses the child's ability to appropriately and consistently space letters within words; (c) Word Spacing, which evaluates the child's ability to appropriately and consistently spaces words within a sentence; (d) Line Alignment, which gauges the degree to which the child can write along the line.…”

Learning Handwriting: Factors Affecting Pen-Movement Fluency in Beginning Writers

“… Molfese et al (2011) found that handwriting accuracy in kindergarten correlated with letter and word naming. For 8-10-year-olds, Caravolas et al (2020) found that spelling ability predicted neatness of letter formation.…”