Does alphabetic-phonetic writing start with the proper name and how does the name affect reading and writing skills? Sixty 4- to 5½-year-old children from middle SES families with Dutch as their first language wrote their proper name and named letters. For each child we created unique sets of words with and without the child’s first letter of the name to test spelling skills and phonemic sensitivity. Name writing correlated with children’s knowledge of the first letter of the name and phonemic sensitivity for the sound of the first letter of the name. Hierarchical regression analysis makes plausible that both knowledge of the first letter’s name and phonemic sensitivity for this letter explain why name writing results in phonetic spelling with the name letter. Practical implications of the findings are discussed.

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The aim of this study was to test that the ability to obtain information about more than one letter at a glance develops prior to conventional reading. This study included 55 Dutch-speaking prereaders (mean age 63.56 months, SD = 6.55) and 45 Hebrew-speaking prereaders (mean age = 66.71 months, SD = 8.35). In a perceptual span task, one letter was projected in the fovea, the other to the right or to the left, at a distance of 4 or 6 letters from the center letter. A second perceptual span task included letter-like forms instead of letters. Eye-tracking was used to control whether children fixated on the center letter or letter-like form during the task. Obtaining information about two letters/forms was easier when the parafoveally projected letter/form was projected to the right for both Hebrew and Dutch children. Hemispheric dominance and not the dominant reading direction (right to left in Hebrew and left to right in Dutch) may explain this preference for right, which may mean that left-to-right reading is easier to learn than right-to-left reading. We did find, nevertheless, some evidence that reading direction in the dominant orthography affected how children divided attention over letters.