Character reversal in children: the prominent role of writing direction

Fischer, Jean‐Paul

doi:10.1007/s11145-016-9688-y

Cited by 26 publications

(30 citation statements)

References 33 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The authors underscore that these results indicate a main contribution of writing directionality to letter and digit reversals. Consequently, they confirm the predominant contribution of writing directionality to mirror writing in typically developing children [46].…”

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

confidence: 71%

“…CYPRIEN, for example, correctly wrote C, P, R, E, and N when he wrote from left to right, but reversed these same letters when he wrote from right to left. Thus, children appear to orient the characters (at least the letters) in the direction of writing [46]. In other words, they tend to reverse the right-oriented letters (B, C, D, E, F, G, K, L N, P, Q, R, and S) when writing from right to left and to reverse the left-oriented letters when writing from left to right (J and Z).…”

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

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

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

Fischer

Luxembourger

2018

Education Sciences

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

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

confidence: 71%

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

confidence: 99%

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

Fischer

Luxembourger

2018

Education Sciences

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As with most other studies on this topic, Study 1 used uppercase letters, which are often the earliest letter forms to be taught to children (Fischer, 2011, 2017a, Fischer & Koch, 2016a, 2016bFischer & Tazouti, 2012). Unlike some previous studies, we did not include digit writing, so we were able to sample very few left-facing characters.…”

Section: Discussion Study 1 Uppercase Lettersmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Initially, it was suggested that children learn through repeated exposure that the majority of letters face to the right, then over-apply this rule, promoting correct writing of right-facing letters (such as B and C), and mirror-writing for left-facing letters (such as J and Z) (Fischer, 2011;Treiman et al, 2014). However, Fischer (2017a) has recently demonstrated that, if children are encouraged (by spatial constraints) to adopt a rightto-left writing direction, then right-facing letters become most often reversed, and left-facing letters the least. This implies that the internalised rule may actually be that letters face in the direction of writing.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Developmental mirror-writing is paralleled by orientation recognition errors

McIntosh

Hillary

Brennan

et al. 2018

Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The writing attempts of children often feature mirror-reversals of individual letters. These reversals are thought to arise from an adaptive tendency to mirror-generalize. However, it is unclear whether mirror-writing is driven by mirror-generalisation of the visual letter forms, or of the actions for writing them. We report two studies of the relationship between mirror-writing and the ability to recognize whether a visually presented letter is in the correct orientation, amongst primary and preschool children learning to read and write in English. Children who produced more mirror-writing also made more orientation recognition errors, for uppercase (Study 1, n = 44) and lowercase letters (Study 2, n = 98), and these relationships remained significant when controlling for age. In both studies, the letters more often reversed in writing were also more prone to orientation recognition errors. Moreover, the rates of mirror-writing of different uppercase letters were closely similar between the dominant and non-dominant hands (Study 1). We also note that, in the recognition tasks, children were more likely to accept reversed letters as correct, than to reject correctly oriented letters, consistent with a tendency to mirror-generalize the visual letter forms. In every aspect, these results support a major role for visual representations in developmental mirror-writing.

show abstract

“…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].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

On the Legibility of Mirror-Reflected and Rotated Text

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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.

show abstract

Character reversal in children: the prominent role of writing direction

Cited by 26 publications

References 33 publications

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

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

Developmental mirror-writing is paralleled by orientation recognition errors

On the Legibility of Mirror-Reflected and Rotated Text

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About