The elaboration of motor programs for the automation of letter production

We investigated how children learn to write letters. Letter writing evolves from stroke-by-stroke to whole-letter programming. Children of ages 6 to 9 (N=98) wrote letters of varying complexity on a digitizer. At ages 6 and 7 movement duration, dysfluency and trajectory increased with stroke number....

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Acta psychologica 2018-01, Vol.182, p.200-211
Main Authors: Thibon, Laurence Séraphin, Gerber, Silvain, Kandel, Sonia
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Automation
Children
Children & youth
Cognitive science
Handwriting
Letters
Linguistics
Motor program
Psychology
Strokes
Writing
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Summary:We investigated how children learn to write letters. Letter writing evolves from stroke-by-stroke to whole-letter programming. Children of ages 6 to 9 (N=98) wrote letters of varying complexity on a digitizer. At ages 6 and 7 movement duration, dysfluency and trajectory increased with stroke number. This indicates that the motor program they activated mainly coded information on stroke production. Stroke number affected the older children's production much less, suggesting that they programmed stroke chunks or the whole letter. The fact that movement duration and dysfluency decreased from ages 6 to 8, and remained stable at ages 8 and 9 suggests that automation of letter writing begins at age 8. Automation seems to require the elaboration of stroke chunks and/or letter-sized motor programs.
ISSN:0001-6918
1873-6297
DOI:10.1016/j.actpsy.2017.12.001