Treiman, Rebecca, Brett Kessler & Tatiana Cury Pollo. 2005, April. U.S. and Brazilian preschoolers’ knowledge of letter names: Variability across letters, languages, and children. Paper presented at the symposium Cross-cultural Approaches to Language and Literacy Development, conducted at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), Atlanta, GA.
In most present-day alphabets, the relationship between the visual shape of a symbol and its linguistic function is arbitrary, as is the relationship between the shape and the name. The link between a letter’s name and its sound is not arbitrary, however: A letter’s name almost always includes its sound. Children in many societies learn the names of the letters from an early age, and they then use the names to help learn and remember the letters’ sounds. Given the role of letter names in this and other aspects of literacy development, it is important to learn more about the processes involved in letter-name learning. The goal of the present study was to examine variation across letters and variation across children in two languages, American English and Brazilian Portuguese.
We asked 318 U.S. preschoolers (mean age 4 years, 8 months) and 369 Brazilian preschoolers (mean age 5 years, 1 month) to identify each uppercase letter of their alphabet by name, and we analyzed the errors and patterns of performance. Visual similarity between letters was a major source of errors, even though no uppercase letters differ only in right-left orientation, as with the lowercase pairs such as b-d that have been the focus of previous research. Phonological similarity also played a role, with children tending to confuse letters whose names were similar in their language. For example, the names of E and R begin with the same phoneme in Portuguese but not in English, and Portuguese speakers confused these letters more often than English speakers. The frequency of the letters in the children’s language was also influential, with children tending to call less frequent letters by the names of more frequent ones. Letters that were nearby in the alphabet were confused significantly more often than expected on the basis of other factors.
A bimodal distribution of performance was observed across children, with some children knowing the names of few letters and other children knowing most or all. Boys were overrepresented at the low end of the continuum, just as they are overrepresented at the low end of the continuum of reading ability at later ages. This result suggests that gender differences in reading ability are not wholly due to boys’ behaviors and teachers’ reactions to those behaviors; some boys come to formal reading instruction lacking important foundational knowledge. The best known letters for a given child tended to be the letters from the child’s first name, especially its initial letter. This result, together with previous findings, shows that children’s own names are important in early literacy acquisition across a variety of cultures.
Because children use the names of letters to help learn the letters’ sounds and make sense of print-speech relationships, problems at the level of letter names can cause problems at other levels. By shedding light on the factors that influence young children’s learning of letter names, our results contribute to an improved understanding of this important foundational skill.
Treiman, R., Kessler, B., & Pollo, T. C. (2005, April). U.S. and Brazilian preschoolers’ knowledge of letter names: Variability across letters, languages, and children. Paper presented at the meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Atlanta, GA.
Last change 2009-08-07T11:09:46-0500