title: Preschoolers' knowledge about the appearance of proper names.
abstract: Preschoolers' knowledge of the appearance of proper names was tested in three experiments with 25 boys and 22 girls from low-income families. Children from a Head Start program, whose parents signed a permission letter, participated. Their ages ranged from 3 yr. 6 mo. to 5 yr. 6 mo. (M = 52.2 mo., SD = 4.9). When shown consonant-vowel-consonant trigrams such as Rit or baF or dEg with various capitalization patterns, the children showed a tendency to recognize that CVC trigrams with the first letter capitalized or all letters capitalized were the ones most likely to represent a person's name. When their own names were substituted, which typically contained more than three letters, their performance was markedly better. Children also had a strong tendency to consider trigrams of Latin letters as more likely to be a person's name than trigrams of non-Latin characters (e.g., Sanskrit).
authors.affiliation: George Mason University, Fairfax, VA 22030, USA.
authors.forename: Kathryn Maycumber
authors.initials: KM
authors.lastname: Stewart
authors.forename: Robert
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Pasnak
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002675:Child, Preschool; D002755:Choice Behavior; D032882:Comprehension; D018479:Early Intervention, Educational; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D009275:Names; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010700:Phonetics; D011932:Reading; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D012858:Size Perception; D014956:Writing