The Effects of Handwriting Experience on Literacy Learning

Abstract

Previous research indicates that writing practice may be more beneficial than nonmotor practice for letter learning. Here, we report a training study comparing typing, visual, and writing learning conditions in adults ( N = 42). We investigated the behavioral consequences of learning modality on literacy learning and evaluated the nature of the learned letter representations. Specifically, the study addressed three questions. First, are the benefits of handwriting practice due to motor learning per se or to other incidental factors? Second, do the benefits generalize to untrained tasks? And third, does handwriting practice lead to learning and strengthening only of motor representations or of other types of representations as well? Our results clearly show that handwriting compared with nonmotor practice produces faster learning and greater generalization to untrained tasks than previously reported. Furthermore, only handwriting practice leads to learning of both motor and amodal symbolic letter representations.

From Hand to Eye With the Devil In-Between: Which Cognitive Mechanisms Underpin the Benefit From Handwriting Training When Learning Visual Graphs?

“…By identifying the key components of this benefit, other tasks besides HW can be used to optimize learning to read. Furthermore, given that HW is becoming an obsolete task in the digital era, its inclusion in school activities depends on the contribution of HW to other facets of literacy beyond writing per se ( Wiley and Rapp, 2021 ). For unveiling this cognitive mechanism, we need to isolate the common denominators, that is, which representations and processes in the learning experience are critical to subsequent visual graph recognition and reading.…”

“…It is underpinned by a frontoparietal associative striatum-cerebellar circuitry that also engages attention and executive processes ( Makino et al, 2016 ; Palmis et al, 2017 ; Vinci-Booher et al, 2019 ). Therefore, at first sight, multiple possible mechanisms could be involved in a transfer effect to visual graph recognition and reading (for a similar discussion, see, Wiley and Rapp, 2021 ).…”

“…For example, B is physically equidistant to both p and b, and hence, without any experience, observers would be as fast in discriminating the pair B-p as the pair B-b. However, readers are slower in discriminating the pair B-b in consonance with the degree of perceptual similarity of graph representations ( Lupyan et al, 2010 ; for recent evidence with training on an artificial script, see, Wiley and Rapp, 2021 ). This example demonstrates that learning to read is an ecological example of perceptual learning ( Gibson, 1969 , 1970 ; Dehaene et al, 2005 ; Goldstone and Byrge, 2015 ).…”

“…In fact, explanatory insights have been rare (notwithstanding recent exceptions: Li and James, 2016 ; Zhai and Fischer-Baum, 2019 ; Seyll et al, 2020 ; Vinci-Booher et al, 2021 ; Wiley and Rapp, 2021 ). We thus came to have misgivings about the underlying mechanism: Why does HW training benefit visual graph recognition?…”

“…On the other hand, abstractionist, symbolic accounts (e.g., Goldinger et al, 2016 ; Machery, 2016 ; Mahon and Hickok, 2016 ) do not deny the role of sensorimotor experiences when learning to read but hold that abstract representations are not reducible to, and hence differ from, modality-dependent ones. In what regards visual graph processing, ample behavioral, neuroimaging, and neuropsychological evidence (e.g., Rapp and Caramazza, 1997 ; Dehaene et al, 2005 ; Lupyan et al, 2010 ; Dufor and Rapp, 2013 ; Wiley and Rapp, 2021 ) shows that symbolic, amodal graph identities are core representations in reading and writing in alphabetic and non-alphabetic scripts (e.g., Carreiras et al, 2013 ; Rothlein and Rapp, 2014 ; Kinoshita et al, 2019 ). These abstract orthographic representations are connected via bidirectional links to the input (visual) and output (motor) systems, with automatic spreading of activation between them ( Rapp and Caramazza, 1997 ; Dufor and Rapp, 2013 ).…”