Developmental mirror-writing is paralleled by orientation recognition errors

Abstract

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.

Commentary: Mirror-Image Equivalence and Interhemispheric Mirror-Image Reversal

“…To conclude, Corballis' suggestion that “early processing retains left-right information for perception, but this is lost at the later stage where recognition takes place” (p. 4) is opportune. Furthermore, his theory's proposition that both hemispheres contain both veridical and reversed representations is compatible with character reversal in writing from memory as a function of a character's orientation, as observed by our research group and by Portex et al ( 2018 ), McIntosh et al ( 2018a , b ), and Treiman et al ( 2014 ). However, it does not exclude other explanations.…”

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

“…Because these wide-ranging data come from the same laboratory, it is important to mention that many other recent and independent findings are consistent with the relative frequency of the character's reversal suggested by the data. Thus, even if this other research was not aimed at establishing the frequency of reversal of the characters, one can note that (1) a study on 44 Scottish children (M age = 6.82, from 4.6 to 10.3) who wrote the uppercase letters found that the likelihood of reversal for J and Z was elevated both in writing with the dominant and non-dominant hands [40]; (2) A training study on 30 French children (M age = 4.63, from 4.25 to 5) found more than 50% reversals for 1, 3, J, and Z, and less than 10% for B, E, N, R and S, which were the only asymmetrical characters studied [41].…”

“…In such a task, children should say whether the writing of a character is correct or not correct, one half of the displayed characters being reversed and the other half being correct. This task was used in a first study on uppercase letters with Scottish children, and in a second study on lowercase letters with Irish children [40]. Both studies found that children who produce more reversals in writing also make more orientation recognition errors.…”

“…The authors concluded that developmental mirror writing is paralleled by orientation recognition errors. However, a more classical recognition task than the letter decision task used in [40] implies a simultaneously displaying of a correctly written character and a mirror writing of this character. How do children choose which writing is correct?…”

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

“…Does other research confirm the right-side bias at the expense of choice based on a digit's orientation in character recognition? To the best of our knowledge, there are only two studies to have examined in a single group of children the relation between left-right reversing when writing characters and falsely recognizing mirror reversed characters [49,50]. Both studies found the two phenomena to be similar.…”