ABSTRACT

This study examined the longitudinal relationship between early handwriting skills and the growth of spelling and reading skills in a large sample (N = 569) of 5- to 6-year-old children unselected for ability. The quality of children’s handwriting was assessed using five indicators (letter form, slant, rhythm, ability, general appearance). Children also completed a wide range of tasks measuring reading, spelling and literacy-related skills (letter-sound knowledge, phoneme awareness, rapid automatized naming). A latent variable path model showed that variations in handwriting skills, but not generic fine motor skills, accounted for unique variance in the growth of spelling, but not reading. Theoretically, these findings suggest that writing words may lead to the creation of motoric representations of spelling patterns that support the development of children’s orthographic knowledge. From an applied perspective, our findings suggest that practice writing words may help children to learn to spell them.

摘要

本研究在未选择能力的 5 至 6 岁儿童的大样本 (N = 569) 中检查了早期手写技能与拼写和阅读技能增长之间的纵向关系。使用五个指标（字母形式、斜度、节奏、能力、总体外观）评估儿童的笔迹质量。孩子们还完成了一系列测量阅读、拼写和读写相关技能（字母发音知识、音素意识、快速自动命名）的任务。一个潜在的变量路径模型表明，手写技能的变化，而不是通用的精细运动技能，解释了拼写增长的独特差异，但不是阅读。理论上，这些发现表明，书写单词可能会导致拼写模式的运动表征的产生，从而支持儿童拼写知识的发展。从应用的角度来看，我们的研究结果表明，练习书写单词可能有助于儿童学习拼写。