Why Do Children Write Letters and Numbers Backwards?

Children often spontaneously write letters and digits backwards, typically during early literacy acquisition. ‘Reversals’have been explained as resulting from mirror generalization, which suggests that children do not store the left-right orientation of characters in memory. Previous research suggests children track statistical regularities (e.g., noticing letters tend to face right) and use this to guide their own writing, more often reversing characters so that they face to the right. The current study seeks to extend the account that children spontaneously notice and encode information about the orientation of characters broadly and may use this implicit knowledge to guide their own writing. The study will test whether recently presented stimuli can influence children’s reversal errors. If children do make more reversal errors in the incongruent priming condition of the focal task, as compared to the neutral priming condition, it would suggest that children do implicitly notice left-right orientation of characters and can be primed by this information. We will also test if children share adults’intuitions on which way specific asymmetrical characters face and whether children recognize that individual asymmetrical characters can only have one orientation. Findings from this research may suggest future steps in better understanding children’s language acquisition and shed more light on the evolutionary mechanisms that support language development.

Hello everyone, I’m Jordan Hassani and today I’m gonna talk about my proposal investigating reversals – or in other words – why children write their letters and numbers backwards.

As some background, a reversal error is when a child writes a letter or number backwards, which can be seen here with the 1, the 2, and the 3. Here they are all actually left facing numbers, but the child has reversed them to be right-facing. Children can make reversal errors as soon as they start writing, and research has shown children are significantly more likely to reverse left-facing characters than right-facing characters, as can be seen in the figure.

The evolutionary process of mirror generalization is commonly used to explain why reverse happen, which suggests that young children do not fully encode the horizontal orientation of characters into memory – This means, that when children ‘forget’the orientation of a character/or in other words/which way that character faces, they have to ‘guess’– this process is presumed to be overridden by literacy development, which can be seen with how children make fewer reversal errors as they age – and this process is believed to be evolutionary adaptive, because stimuli in the natural environment are typically invariant across left-right changes – for example, looking at this lion, the two pictures are mirror images of eachother, but whether looking at the left or the right image, the meaning we take away is the same – they are dangerous lions!

Now, looking at these letters, b and d, they too are mirror images of eachother, but each can have different meaning and different uses based on the context their used in. This is a good example of how an evolutionary adaptive process, mirror generalization, can be so detrimental for children learning how to write.

There are a few different theories which attempt to explain why children tend to reverse left-facing characters significantly more often than right-facing characters, but at the core of these theories is that children appear to track and encode task-relevant information, and use this information to guide their writing. An example of this can be seen with how children tend to mimic the orientation of preceding characters when they make a reversal. Looking at the table here, lets imagine that a child is about to write the number 3, and they have just correctly written the number 1 – keeping in mind both 3 and 1 are left facing when correctly written. In this scenario, there is a 31% chance the child will reverse the 3. However, if this 3 were to be preceded by a reversed 1 or a correctly written 5 (both right facing characters), there is a much higher chance this 3 will now be reversed to align with the orientation of the preceding characters, these chances being 86% and 65.5% respectively.

Our current study seeks to extend the account that children spontaneously notice and encode information about the orientation of characters broadly – and that exposure to recent characters may prime an orientation, encouraging children’s nascent representations of orientation to be overwritten – so, essentially, we are trying to better understand whether children are more likely to make reversals when ‘primed’with specific orientations.

We’re going to do this by presenting children with visual streams of characters, attempting to prime an orientation in mind, and see if this encourages a reversal or not. Here, we have an example of what this would look like – and after children have observed the sequence, they would pick between a correctly written target and its mirrored form.

Here we can see all the conditions of the focal task, as I just showed you with one of the incgrongruent conditions, it’s a right facing sequence with a left facing target and its reversed form. With the other incongruent condition, it’s a left facing sequence and a right facing target and its reversed form. And then the 2 neutral sequences are just a bunch of letters where we try to avoid priming any orientation, and then we show them either a left or right facing character and, of course, their reversed forms.

In our second task, we simply measure intuitions about which way children think specific characters face. For each character, children will simply indicate whether they think it is left facing or right facing for each character.

For our final task, we are just trying to better understand where they think its incorrect to make reversals, so we just have them answer whether they think that’s okay or that’s a mistake to stories of others writing letters and digits correctly and backwards.

In the focal task, children will make more reversals in the incongruent priming condition compared to the neutral priming condition. May provide support for Treiman & Kessler’s (2011) statistical learning account. Older children will be more likely to show explicit knowledge that characters have specific orientations. Suggest that they are aware that orientation matters when writing. Children will show general consensus in intuitions about orientations of characters. Support notion that children track orientation early on and may use it to guide their responses (Treiman & Kessler, 2011).

Here we have references.

And that is the end of my presentation, thank you for your time and please feel free to drop any questions below, and I’ll be more than happy to respond. Thank you for your time and have a good rest of your day.