title: Into the Looking Glass: Literacy Acquisition and Mirror Invariance in Preschool and First-Grade Children.
abstract: At what point in reading development does literacy impact object recognition and orientation processing? Is it specific to mirror images? To answer these questions, forty-six 5- to 7-year-old preschoolers and first graders performed two same-different tasks differing in the matching criterion-orientation-based versus shape-based (orientation independent)-on geometric shapes and letters. On orientation-based judgments, first graders outperformed preschoolers who had the strongest difficulty with mirrored pairs. On shape-based judgments, first graders were slower for mirrored than identical pairs, and even slower than preschoolers. This mirror cost emerged with letter knowledge. Only first graders presented worse shape-based judgments for mirrored and rotated pairs of reversible (e.g., b-d; b-q) than nonreversible (e.g., e-ә) letters, indicating readers' difficulty in ignoring orientation contrasts relevant to letters.
authors.affiliation: Universidade de Lisboa.
authors.forename: Tânia
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Fernandes
authors.affiliation: Universidade de Évora.
authors.forename: Isabel
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Leite
authors.affiliation: Université Libre de Bruxelles.|Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique-FNRS.
authors.forename: Régine
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kolinsky
mesh_terms: D000367:Age Factors; D002648:Child; D002657:Child Development / Q000502:physiology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D006801:Humans; D000067010:Literacy; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual / Q000502:physiology*; D011932:Reading; D013028:Space Perception / Q000502:physiology*