Young children's knowledge about printed names.
Four experiments examined young children's knowledge about the visual characteristics of writing, specifically personal names. Children younger than 4 years of age, even those who could read no simple words, showed some knowledge about the horizontal orientation of English names, the Latin letters that make them up, and their left-to-right directionality. Preschoolers also had some familiarity with the shapes of the letters in their own first name, especially the leftmost letter. Knowledge of the conventional capitalization pattern for English names emerged later, after a period during which children preferred names in all uppercase letters. When tested with personal names, the kind of word they know best, young children are surprisingly knowledgeable about the visual characteristics of writing.
Treiman
Rebecca
R
Department of Psychology, Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA. rtreiman@wustl.edu
Cohen
Jeremy
J
Mulqueeny
Kevin
K
Kessler
Brett
B
Schechtman
Suzanne
S
D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003210:Concept Formation; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007804:Language Development; D008297:Male; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D011932:Reading; D012660:Semantics; D014706:Verbal Learning; D014956:Writing