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Second and fourth graders' copying ability: from graphical to linguistic processing
Author(s) -
Grabowski Joachim,
Weinzierl Christian,
Schmitt Markus
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
journal of research in reading
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.077
H-Index - 51
eISSN - 1467-9817
pISSN - 0141-0423
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9817.2009.01431.x
Subject(s) - copying , symbol (formal) , numeral system , psychology , class (philosophy) , arithmetic , linguistics , computer science , natural language processing , cognitive psychology , communication , artificial intelligence , mathematics , programming language , philosophy , political science , law
Particularly in primary school, good performance on copy tasks is an important working technique. With respect to writing skills, copying is a very basic process on which more complex writing abilities are based. We studied the copying ability of second and fourth graders across four types of symbols which vary with respect to their semantic and phonological characteristics: arbitrary graphical objects, unpronounceable consonant strings, numerals and meaningful text. Results show, in terms of average copying speed, significant effects of both factors: fourth graders performed generally faster than second graders, and for both class levels, the number of copied characters per time decreased from meaningful text to graphical objects, all pair‐wise contrasts between symbol types being statistically significant. Moreover, a significant interaction shows that fourth graders improved more when copying symbols that form pronounceable chunks, namely meaningful text and numerical strings. This indicates an increasing role of phonological (and probably also semantic) processes involved in copying across primary school.