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

Abstract

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.

The Battle between the Correct and Mirror Writings of a Digit in Children’s Recognition Memory

“…In the case of the digits, we expected them to choose the correct writings of 4, 5, and 6, but the incorrect writings of 1, 2, 3, 7, and 9; that is, respectively. Note that the debatable right-oriented categorization of digit 4 was well argued in other studies [28,33].…”

“…The influence of other individual factors was either insignificant, in the case of pointing hand and age (within the restricted age range of our participants), or ambiguous, in the case of gender. It also suggests that the left-right orientation of the digits, which appears to be a major explanation for their reversal in a left-right writing culture [28][29][30], plays only a minor role when children are prompted to choose between a digit and its mirror, differentiated by their left or right horizontal position. These results are in accord with the confirmation of our right-side response hypothesis (Hypothesis 3) at the expense of the digit orientation hypothesis (Hypothesis 2).…”

“…Because this process results in an unoriented representation of the characters in memory, children who are asked to write a character on a sheet of paper should be in difficulty [27]. The empirical work by Fischer and coworkers [28] shows that a great number of these children adopt a simple, but reasonable, solution to overcome the difficulty. They merely orient the characters in the direction of writing [29,30].…”

“…First, because unoriented representations are also activated in reading or recognition tasks (see [28], Section 5.5), a "battle" should be observed when children must make a choice between correctly or mirror-written characters. Second, if such a battle occurs, do children apply the same solution; that is, to prefer the characters oriented in the direction of writing, whether correctly or mirror written?…”

“…Conversely, most of the digits (1, 2, 3, 7, and 9) are reported as being left-oriented [32]. Thus, digits offer a greater possibility for observing reversal errors if these errors are induced by a character's left orientation, as suggested for writing the characters [28].…”