Into the Looking Glass: Literacy Acquisition and Mirror Invariance in Preschool and First-Grade Children

• Autores: Tânia Fernandes, Isabel Leite, Regine Kolinsky
• Localización: Child development, ISSN 0009-3920, Vol. 87, Nº. 6, 2016, págs. 2008-2025
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • 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.