Handwriting or Typewriting? The Influence of Penor Keyboard-Based Writing Training on Reading and Writing Performance in Preschool Children

Abstract

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 multidimensionality of Japanese kanji abilities

“…On the one hand, the ease of typing or other supportive capabilities of digital tools are seen to be advantageous for literacy learning, particularly in children with undeveloped motor skills 35 or reading/writing difficulties 36 . On the other hand, it has been argued that the coupling of motor action and perception during handwriting can facilitate literacy acquisition, based on evidence from experimental 37 , neuroimaging 38 , and intervention studies 39 . Our data support the latter view and imply that keeping the habit of handwriting may be important for integrated mastery of higher-level literacy skills in adults.…”

Introduction to the special issue on the dynamics of written word production: methods, models and processing units

“…Although handwriting provides added value for literacy (Longcamp, Zerbato-Poudou, & Velay, 2005), studies that address this issue from an educational perspective are few. Kindergartners tend to benefit more from handwriting training than typing training when they are subsequently asked to perform a word writing task (Kiefer et al, 2015), suggesting that handwriting is a better way than keyboarding to memorize spelling sequences at the very beginning of learning. However, the influence of low-level automaticity on writing skills has been evidenced for both handwriting and keyboarding, and a lack of fluency with a pen or keyboard leads to difficulties in text production (Beers, Mickail, Abbott, & Berninger, 2017;Graham & Harris, 2016).…”

Motor expertise for typing impacts lexical decision performance

“…It was then suggested that reading might be affected in persons able to type but not to handwrite. However, these studies did not really address reading processes, at least at the word level (except to some extent [10]). In the present study, we took the opposite view: We decided to check whether word recognition would be modified by typing habits and we compared expert and non-expert typists in a word identification task.…”

“…Letter recognition being one of the earliest steps in word reading, motor knowledge is likely to affect skilled reading [8][9]. Beyond single letter identification, it is nonetheless still impossible to affirm that teaching typing instead of handwriting would have an effect on reading whole words (but see [10]).…”