Learning about the letter name subset of the vocabulary: Evidence from US and Brazilian preschoolers

Abstract

To examine the factors that affect the learning of letter names, an important foundation for literacy, we asked 318 US and 369 Brazilian preschoolers to identify each uppercase letter. Similarity of letter shape was the major determinant of confusion errors in both countries, and children were especially likely to interchange letters that were similar in shape as well as name. Errors were also affected by letter frequency, both general frequency and occurrence of letters in children's own names. Differences in letter names and letter frequencies between English and Portuguese led to certain differences in the patterns of performance for children in the two countries. Other differences appeared to reflect US children's greater familiarity with the conventional order of the alphabet. Boys were overrepresented at the low end of the continuum of letter name knowledge, suggesting that some boys begin formal reading instruction lacking important foundational skills.

A letter visual-similarity matrix for Latin-based alphabets

“…Among the various types of errors that children make in such tasks are letter confusion errors-that is, providing the name or sound of a letter different from the one presented (e.g., responding with the name of "b" when presented with the letter "d"). Such errors are commonly observed in many alphabetic languages (e.g., for English and Portuguese, see Treiman, Kessler, & Pollo, 2006; for Spanish, see Goikoetxea, 2006). Identifying the factors that drive letter confusion errors is critical for understanding how children acquire letter knowledge, which is known to be one of the best predictors of later reading ability (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998).…”

“…The shortcomings of the available letter visual-similarity matrices for use in analyzing reading data are demonstrated by the fact that recent studies that have analyzed the visual similarity of child letter confusion errors in different languages (e.g., English, Portuguese, and Hebrew) have constructed their own similarity matrices (Treiman et al, 2006;Treiman, Levin, and Kessler 2007). In each case, the method used to construct the rating of visual similarity was the same.…”

“…Our goal in this article was to address these points by creating a visualsimilarity matrix for letters that could mainly be used by investigators carrying out research in reading in different alphabetic languages. The technique that we employed to construct the similarity matrix was the same as the one used in previous studies examining letter knowledge in children (Treiman et al, 2006;Treiman, Levin, and Kessler 2007) and is based on data obtained under normal (untimed) reading conditions. We anticipate that the matrix presented here will also prove useful to researchers in any field of investigation in which Latin letters are used as stimuli and a measure of visual similarity between stimuli is required.…”

El conocimiento de las grafías y la secuencia de aprendizaje de los grafemas en español: precursores de la lectura temprana

“…Así, las investigaciones aludidas demuestran que el orden de las grafías en el alfabeto inglés y el desarrollo fonológico condicionan la secuencia de aprendizaje de los grafemas (Jones, Clark, y Reutzel, 2013;Justice, Pence, Bowles, y Wiggins, 2006;Treiman, Kessler, y Pollo, 2006).…”

“…Las divergencias encontradas en la secuencia del aprendizaje de los grafemas pueden estar motivadas por los distintos grados de transparencia ortográfica de las lenguas (Defior y Serrano, 2014;Ziegler et al, 2010). Los trabajos de Jones et al (2013), Justice et al (2006) y Treiman et al (2006 consideran relevante el orden de las grafías en la cadena alfabética en inglés. Sin embargo, nuestros resultados con sujetos españoles son opuestos.…”