Mirror writing in typically developing children: A first longitudinal study

Fischer, Jean‐Paul; Koch, Anne-Marie

doi:10.1016/j.cogdev.2016.02.005

Cited by 37 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 34 publications

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“…First, a cross-sectional study found that 205 children in the middle section of preschool (4-to 5-year-olds) produced only 7.32% reversals in copying the digits, whereas 153 children in the upper section (5-to-6-year-olds) produced 21.81% reversals in writing the digits from memory [35] (Expt 1). Second, a longitudinal study found that the 166 children in the middle section produced only 3.62% reversals in copying the characters, whereas the same children in the upper section produced 25.39% mirror reversals in writing the characters from memory [43]. If the process of copying did not fundamentally differ from the process of writing from memory-specifically, in being easier-developmental psychology would find it difficult to explain why children in the middle section of preschool produced considerably less reversal errors than the children in the upper section.…”

Section: Children Rarely Reverse the Characters When Copying Themmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…One way to do this would be to compare mirror reversals in cultures with different writing directions, but this is not easy to do for a number of reasons (e.g., the characters may be different). Consequently, many researches [35,37,[41][42][43] applied a technique devised in [45] to observe spontaneous mirror writing of their name (or words) by young children. The technique consists of asking children to write their name on sheets of paper bisected by a vertical line, and to start writing at a dot near the bisecting line, sometimes to the left of the line and sometimes to the right.…”

Section: Children Reverse Right-oriented Letters When Writing From Rimentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Educ Figure 3. Name writings as a function of writing direction by a sample of six children (data from [35,43]). (Written informed consent to publish name writings was obtained from each child's legal guardian).…”

Section: Children Reverse Right-oriented Letters When Writing From Rimentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Synoptic and Theoretical Account of Character (Digits and Capital Letters) Reversal in Writings by Typically Developing Children

Fischer

Luxembourger

2018

Education Sciences

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Reversing characters (digits and letters) when writing, and complete mirror writing, raise one of the oldest and most mysterious questions in developmental and educational psychology: Why do five-year-old children write symbols (e.g., ∃ for E) they have neither learnt nor seen? Attempts to draw up a complete explanatory theory of character reversal in writings by typically developing children were long hindered by the existence of a seemingly satisfactory explanation (left-hand writing), the failure to bring together research in neuropsychology and educational psychology, and the failure to consider the shape and structure of the characters. The present paper remedies this situation by describing a new, comprehensive theory based on recent neuropsychological findings and extensive empirical observations. The theory assumes that a character's orientation, detected in the early visual processing area, is deleted (or made inaccessible) by the mirror generalization process during transfer to memory. Consequently, there is a period, usually around age five, during which children have representations of the characters' shapes but not their orientations. Hence, when asked to write a character, children have to improvise its orientation, and the orientation they choose (implicitly, non-consciously) is often derived from the writing direction in their culture. Introduction: Historical BackgroundCharacter reversal, which results in left-right reversed characters (letters and digits) that appear normal when read in a mirror, is a major component of mirror writing. In the scientific literature, it was first described in 1878 by Buchwald, who reported several cases of character reversal in writing by patients with brain lesions and by healthy individuals, most notably children, nearly all of whom wrote with their left hand [1]. This pioneering study launched a new field of research and triggered numerous reports of mirror writing by both pathological and non-pathological individuals. Less felicitously, Buchwald's implicit suggestion that mirror writing was restricted to people who wrote with their left hand, whether naturally or deliberately, would cloud research for over a century.Erlenmeyer immediately included Buchwald's paper in his book on "Writing", quoting at length the paragraph describing children who mirror wrote with their left hand, but, when alerted to the incorrectness of their writing, wrote correctly with their right hand [2]. Furthermore, by suggesting "abductive left-hand writing" (linkshändige Abductionsschrift in German) as a more appropriate name for "mirror writing", Erlenmeyer reduced mirror writing to a mechanistic result of writing with the left hand: Characters and words are reversed when an individual writes abductively (outwards from the body midline) with the left hand.

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Section: Children Rarely Reverse the Characters When Copying Themmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Children Reverse Right-oriented Letters When Writing From Rimentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Synoptic and Theoretical Account of Character (Digits and Capital Letters) Reversal in Writings by Typically Developing Children

Fischer

Luxembourger

2018

Education Sciences

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“…The fact that the mirror-reversed word "AMBULANCE" can still be read in Figure 2A suggests that the visual system may incorporate some amount of mirror invariance, at least with respect to simple single-letter or single-word representations of text. This notion is bolstered by the fact that young children often make spontaneous mirror-reversals of single letters when learning to read and write [1][2][3][4]. Typical errors include reading or writing 'b' for 'd' or transposing the position of letters in a word as in 'was' for 'saw', but also include mirror-reversals of other letters that do not form a new letter upon reversal (e.g., 'a').…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Mirror-writing involves qualitatively different processes from mirror-reading since, in reading, the letters are continuously visible, but in writing the correct facing direction of letters must be retrieved from memory. For some recent work on mirror-writing see [3,[155][156][157][158][159][160][161].…”

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confidence: 99%

On the Legibility of Mirror-Reflected and Rotated Text

et al. 2017

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Abstract:We happened to observe that text that was reflected about either the horizontal or vertical axis was more difficult to read than text that was reflected about first one and then the other, which amounts to a 180-degree rotation. In this article, we review a number of studies that examine the nature of recognizing reflected and inverted letters, and the frequency of mirror reversal errors (e.g., confusing 'b' for 'd') in children and adults. We explore recent ideas linking the acquisition of literacy with the loss of mirror-invariance, not just for text, but for objects in general. We try to connect these various literatures to examine why certain transformations of text are more difficult to read than others for adults. Keywords: mirror-reversal; left-right reversal; reading; reversal errors; mirrored textRecently, one of us held up a page of printed text ( Figure 1A) to their webcam to take a picture. The camera software by default created a mirror-image snapshot (i.e., the text was reflected or mirrored about the vertical axis, Figure 1B) thereby rendering the text virtually illegible. Correcting or undoing this sort of reflection can be trivially accomplished using any number of image processing software packages that include built-in functions such as 'reflect vertical', 'reflect horizontal', 'rotate left', and 'rotate right'. It was with some surprise that when the wrong function was accidentally applied and instead of reflecting along the vertical axis, the image was reflected along the horizontal axis, the text, although now reflected twice, was now more easily legible ( Figure 1D). It is of note that this 'double reflection' is equivalent to a 180 • rotation of the text. With only a few mouse clicks, it was clear that when normally-oriented text is mirror reflected about the horizontal axis it again becomes virtually illegible ( Figure 1C). This brief series of webcam-picture inspired observations demonstrated a basic property of text perception and reading: the legibility of text is reflection variant and rotation invariant.Inspired by these observations, we conducted a review of the corresponding work on the intersection of symmetry, reflections, and the legibility of text. We found a large body of literature on mirror-reading and writing; mirror-reversal errors of single letters in reading, copying, and writing; many studies on perception of normal and mirrored single characters; but only a small number of studies on combinations of geometric transformations including both inversion (up-down mirroring) and reflection (left-right mirroring). In this paper, we review the literature on mirror-reversals and inversions of text and synthesize some recent work and ideas on how representational mirror-invariance not only for letters but also for objects may be lost when someone learns how to read.

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