Letter Features as Predictors of Letter-Name Acquisition in Four Languages with Three Scripts

To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters - their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters - relate to children's le...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Scientific studies of reading 2021, Vol.25 (6), p.453-469
Main Authors: Kim, Young-Suk Grace, Petscher, Yaacov, Treiman, Rebecca, Kelcey, Benjamin
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Alphabets
Children
College Students
Contrastive Linguistics
Difficulty Level
English language
Foreign Countries
Grade 1
Hebrew language
Item Response Theory
Kindergarten
Korean
Korean language
Language Variation
Learning
North American English
Orthographic Symbols
Phoneme Grapheme Correspondence
Portuguese
Portuguese language
Preschool Children
Printed Materials
Rating Scales
Reading acquisition
Semitic Languages
Task Analysis
Visual Discrimination
Written Language
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Summary:To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters - their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters - relate to children's letter-name knowledge in four languages with three distinct scripts (English [N = 318; M age = 4.90], Portuguese [N = 366; M age = 5.80], Korean [N = 168; M age = 5.48], and Hebrew [N = 645; M age = 5.42]). Explanatory item response modeling analysis showed that the frequency of letters in printed materials was consistently related to letter difficulty across the four languages. There were also moderation effects for letter difficulty in English and Korean, and for discriminatory power of letters in Korean. The results suggest that exposure to letters as measured by letter frequency is a language-general mechanism in the learning of alphabet letters.
ISSN:1088-8438
1532-799X
DOI:10.1080/10888438.2020.1830406