Premium
Into the Looking Glass: Literacy Acquisition and Mirror Invariance in Preschool and First‐Grade Children
Author(s) -
Fernandes Tânia,
Leite Isabel,
Kolinsky Régine
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
child development
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.103
H-Index - 257
eISSN - 1467-8624
pISSN - 0009-3920
DOI - 10.1111/cdev.12550
Subject(s) - psychology , orientation (vector space) , reading (process) , literacy , point (geometry) , object (grammar) , developmental psychology , matching (statistics) , cognitive psychology , linguistics , artificial intelligence , mathematics , computer science , geometry , pedagogy , statistics , philosophy
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.