Linking the shapes of alphabet letters to their sounds: the case of Hebrew

Abstract

Learning the sounds of letters is an important part of learning a writing system. Most previous studies of this process have examined English, focusing on variations in the phonetic iconicity of letter names as a reason why some letter sounds (such as that of b, where the sound is at the beginning of the letter's name) are easier to learn than others (such as that of w, where the sound is not in the name). The present study examined Hebrew, where variations in the phonetic iconicity of letter names are minimal. In a study of 391 Israeli children with a mean age of 5 years, 10 months, we used multilevel models to examine the factors that are associated with knowledge of letter sounds. One set of factors involved letter names: Children sometimes attributed to a letter a consonant-vowel sound consisting of the first phonemes of the letter's name. A second set of factors involved contrast: Children had difficulty when there was relatively little contrast in shape between one letter and others. Frequency was also important, encompassing both child-specific effects, such as a benefit for the first letter of a child's forename, and effects that held true across children, such as a benefit for the first letters of the alphabet. These factors reflect general properties of human learning.

A letter visual-similarity matrix for Latin-based alphabets

“…Although these forms may not be considered separate letters, they nevertheless affect stress assignment, pronunciation, and the meanings of words in the languages in which they occur, highlighting the importance of their inclusion in a letter visual-similarity matrix. We believe that our matrix will be a valuable tool for conducting experimental research in psycholinguistics, which may involve the selection of letter stimuli on the basis of their visual similarity (Burgund & Abernathy, 2008); for informing cognitive neuropsychological reading research (Brunsdon, Coltheart, & Nickels, 2006;Fiset et al, 2006); and for determining the factors that influence reading acquisition and development (Treiman et al, 2006(Treiman et al, , 2012Treiman, Levin, and Kessler, 2007).…”

Frequency Analyses of Prephonological Spellings as Predictors of Success in Conventional Spelling

“…For each child, those frequencies were then correlated with the frequencies from the corpus, yielding a single Kendall rank correlation coefficient, τ, which expressed how similar the child’s monogram frequency profile was to the corpus. Because of some evidence that children tend to learn the first two or three letters of the alphabet better than other comparable letters (Treiman, Levin, & Kessler, 2007, 2010), the correlations we used were actually partial rank correlations between the child’s frequency and the corpus frequency, given the letters’ rank order in the alphabet.…”

Using a Digital Spelling Game for Promoting Alphabetic Knowledge of Preschoolers: The Contribution of Auditory and Visual Supports

“…The ability to segment a word into subsyllables and phonemes is acquired less naturally than the ability to segment words into syllables and, thus, requires instruction (McBride-Chang, 2004;Share, 2008). Letter knowledge includes recognizing the form of letters, their names, the connection between the graphic form of the letter and its name, and the connection between the graphic form of the letter and the sound it represents (Robins et al, 2014;Treiman, Levin, & Kessler, 2012). Writing with preschoolers serves as a good method for supporting the development of both phonological awareness and letter knowledge (Bingham, Quinn, & Gerde, 2017;Levin, Aram, Tolchinsky, & McBride, 2013;Puranik & Al Otaiba, 2012).…”