Dynamics of mirror writing compared to conventional writing in typical preliterate children

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].…”

“…One way to do this would be to compare mirror reversals in cultures with different writing directions, but this is not easy to do for a number of reasons (e.g., the characters may be different). Consequently, many researches [35,37,[41][42][43] applied a technique devised in [45] to observe spontaneous mirror writing of their name (or words) by young children. The technique consists of asking children to write their name on sheets of paper bisected by a vertical line, and to start writing at a dot near the bisecting line, sometimes to the left of the line and sometimes to the right.…”

“…In the training study [41], there were in fact two conditions designed to compare production of normal versus mirror writing of characters. In the already reported normal condition (see Section 3.1), the trained preliterate children reversed mainly the left-oriented characters.…”

“…Despite minimizing the role attributed to the motor-related memory in the initial learning of the characters, this result only partially supports our theory of writing, because it was found with a final recognition test. Therefore, it is worth mentioning also a recent learning experiment who tested mirror-writing with a final writing test [41]. This experiment trained 30 French children to write words and digits with their usual right hand.…”