Washington University in St. Louis / Psychology / Brett Kessler

Treiman, Rebecca, Iris Levin & Brett Kessler. 2007. Learning of letter names follows similar principles across languages: Evidence from Hebrew. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology 96. 87−106. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2006.08.002

This is a preprint of an article that has been accepted for publication in the Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, the only definitive repository of the content that has been certified and accepted after peer review. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by Elsevier. This material may not be copied or reposted without explicit permission.

Abstract

Letter names play an important role in early literacy. Previous studies of letter name learning have examined the Latin alphabet. The current study tested children learning the Hebrew alphabet, comparing their patterns of performance and types of errors to those of U.S. children. We analyzed letter naming data from 645 Israeli children who had not begun formal reading instruction, a younger group (mean age 5 years, 2 months) and an older group (mean age 6 years, 2 months). Children’s errors often involved letters with similar shapes or letters adjacent to one another in the alphabet. Most Hebrew names are not very similar to one another phonologically, and there were fewer phonologically-based confusions than observed in English. We found both general frequency effects and frequency effects that reflected the letters in individual children’s names. On average, girls knew more letter names than boys. The results suggest that letter name learning follows similar principles across languages.

Paper

• Science Direct.
• Unofficial submitted manuscript, PDF format.

Data

• Confusion matrix: number of times each letter name was incorrectly given when another letter shape was presented. HTML. CSV.
• Proportion correct responses in letter naming task, for each letter. HTML. CSV.
• Similarity ratings between Hebrew letter shapes. HTML. CSV.
• Own name analyses in CSV (comma-separated variables) format. For each letter of the alphabet, shows what proportion of the 645 Israeli children identified the letter correctly, broken down by whether the child had that letter at the beginning of his or her own first name, elsewhere in the first name, or didn't have the letter in the name at all. Also shows a similar analysis for errors: for each letter of the alphabet, what proportion of the letter names given as wrong answers were that letter, broken down by where that letter occurs in the child's name. These analyses are also run separately for children under 70 months of age and those 70 months old or older.

APA citation:

Treiman, R., Levin, I., & Kessler, B. (2007). Learning of letter names follows similar principles across languages: Evidence from Hebrew. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 96, 87−106. doi:10.1016/j.jecp.2006.08.002

Last change 2009-07-21T14:47:56-0500