The effects of handwriting practice on literacy skills beyond visual graph recognition: A systematic review

Abstract

Research on the impact of handwriting on literacy acquisition has been largely focused on 11 the beneficial effects of handwriting-concurrent practice on a specific, though fundamental dimen-12 sion: visual graph recognition. In the present systematic review, our aim was to understand the 13 extent to which other levels of literacy may be influenced by handwriting-concurrent training when 14 compared to pure visual exposure or other types of motor activity like typing. Besides visual graph 15 processing - which we considered both in the receptive/reading-related dimension of recognition 16 and in the productive/writing-related dimension of production, we searched for effects of handwrit-17 ing on graph-sound associations, sequencing, and semantic processing - all viewed from the two 18 possible perspectives of reading vs. writing. Following the PRISMA guidelines, we selected 18 stud-19 ies for in-depth analysis. Results highlighted two major ideas. First, literacy-related areas such as 20 sequencing in reading or semantic meaning processing in writing seem to be absent in the literature. 21 Second, the well-known benefits of handwriting on visual graph recognition may not be as clear in 22 other literacy-related levels as they are in visual graph processing. Semantic processing is a partic-23 ularly interesting case, in that detrimental effects of handwriting have been found, and these may 24 be explained by the cognitive load imposed by motor action.