Studies on the written characters orientation and its influence on digit reversal by children

Abstract

Recent research has found that children reverse mainly the leftoriented characters when writing from memory (e.g. they write ɩ and ε instead of J and 3). In order to obtain an objective definition of the left-orientation of a character, the ratings of the level of leftorientation of all the asymmetrical capital letters and digits by 142 adult students was analysed in Study 1. Study 2, on 298 five-sixyear-old children, examined an immediate prediction of Study 1, namely that the children reverse mainly the digits that the adult students have rated left-oriented. Other predictions, both of the posited representation of the writing during the reversal stage and the neurological process of mirror generalisation, were verified: the simplicity of the representation of the symmetrical digits 0 and 8 makes incorrect writings very rare; the mirror generalisation, which operates only in the left-right direction, makes other transformations (inversion or 180° rotation) very rare. Finally, the explanatory power of some putative individual factors of reversal (e.g. writing with the left hand) is shown to be far lower than that of the left-orientation of the characters. A short historical backgroundReversal of characters -letters and digits (for digits see Figure 1) -in the writing of the typical developing child is a phenomenon know at least since the beginning of the twentieth century. This is testified by Fuller (1916) who, speaking on mirror writing, of which left-right reversal of the characters is a component, wrote that 'nearly every child at a certain period of its development will be found to produce spontaneous, fragmentary mirror-writing with the right hand' (p. 201). However, the fact that neuropsychologists and developmental psychologists have thought having a 'good' explanation of the phenomenon -the left-handedness of the children -has restricted the spreading of this information (incompatible with the good explanation) and prevented the emergence of another explanation. On the contrary, the paper by Fischer and Koch (2016a), in questioning and even rejecting the explanation by hand of writing, encourages the exploration of another explanation. Such other explanation was already suggested by Simner (1984) who remarked that children 'reverse the left-facing letters more often than the right-facing letters' (p. 141).

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

“…The correlation between the frequencies of reversal of the characters in the two groups was very strong, r(21) = 0.962. A further study confirmed the lack of a qualitative difference between reversal in the two groups but suggested a slightly greater frequency of reversal in children who wrote with the left hand [38] (see also [35], Expt 1a).…”

“…We do not exclude that the absence of orientation can in fact result from two differently oriented representations, perhaps one in each hemisphere [60], whose accesses are random or determined by situational or cultural constraints. However, the analysis for the digits [38], on the basis of a character feature set [71], suggests rather a single representation. Because it has no orientation, this representation cannot help a child decide how to orient a character when he or she has to write it from memory (under dictation) or choose between a correctly written character and its mirror image.…”

“…There remains the possibility of a very slight quantitative tendency for children who write with their left hand to produce more reversals than children who write with their right hand. Anyway, this explanation of reversal is considerably less relevant than the explanation through the orientation of the characters (see the discussion and demonstration in [38]).…”

“…The following paragraphs focus on four main recent empirical findings that are consistent with these neuropsychological findings and comprehensively disprove the old theories. Tables 1 and 2 show reversal percentages-calculated with respect to the total number of correct and reversed productions-for writings of digits and capital letters, as recorded during a series of studies in the same laboratory [33][34][35][36][37][38][39]. In the case of the digits, these studies involved a total of 1563 children.…”

“…Given the difficulty of producing a mathematical definition for left-and right-oriented characters, researchers have adopted an empirical approach [38,50]. The results of a study in which adult students were asked to rate the orientation of all the asymmetric capital letters and digits support the intuitive definition, as the only digits to be classified as right-oriented were 4, 5, and 6, and the only letters to be considered left-oriented were J and Z [38]. Furthermore, there was a very strong correlation between the way the capital letters were rated by American students [50] and by French students [38].…”