Learning about the letter name subset of the vocabulary: Evidence from US and Brazilian preschoolers

To examine the factors that affect the learning of letter names, an important foundation for literacy, we asked 318 US and 369 Brazilian preschoolers to identify each uppercase letter. Similarity of letter shape was the major determinant of confusion errors in both countries, and children were especially likely to interchange letters that were similar in shape as well as name. Errors were also affected by letter frequency, both general frequency and occurrence of letters in children’s own names. Differences in letter names and letter frequencies between English and Portuguese led to certain differences in the patterns of performance for children in the two countries. Other differences appeared to reflect US children’s greater familiarity with the conventional order of the alphabet. Boys were overrepresented at the low end of the continuum of letter name knowledge, suggesting that some boys begin formal reading instruction lacking important foundational skills. A child’s ability to identify the letters of the alphabet by name is one of the best predictors of how readily he or she will learn to read. Kindergarten letter identification accounts for nearly one-third of the variance in reading ability in Grades 1 to 3, and it is almost as successful at predicting later reading skill as an entire reading readiness test (Snow, Burns, & Griffin, 1998). Knowledge of letter names aids would-be readers and spellers in several ways (see Foulin, 2005). It helps them make some sense of printed words such as jail, where the entire name of one or more of the letters is heard in the spoken word. In addition, letter name knowledge helps children learn about the sound-symbolizing function of letters, because the phoneme that a letter represents is usually heard in the letter’s name. Effects of letter name knowledge on reading, spelling, and letter sound knowledge have been documented in languages as diverse as English (McBride-Chang, 1999; Treiman, Tincoff, Rodriguez, Mouzaki, & Francis, 1998), Portuguese (Abreu & Cardoso-Martins, 1998), and Hebrew (Levin, Patel, Margalit, & Barad, 2002). Given the foundational role of alphabet knowledge in literacy development, it is important to understand the processes involved in letter name learning. In the present study, we explore the hypothesis that these are the same processes © 2006 Cambridge University Press 0142-7164/06 $12.00 Applied Psycholinguistics 27:2 212 Treiman et al.: Letter name learning underlying the acquisition of spoken vocabulary in general. This hypothesis is motivated by the fact that children in the United States and other literate societies begin to learn the names of letters as early as 2 or 3 years of age, at the same time they are learning the names of many other things. For a young child, learning to label the shape D with the syllable /di/ may be quite similar to learning to label the shape with the label /stAr/.1 It may be several years before the child realizes that D symbolizes a linguistic unit, a phoneme, and in this respect is different from . Letter name learning may thus form a bridge between the acquisition of a spoken vocabulary and the acquisition of literacy. If this hypothesis is correct, it would suggest that vocabulary development and literacy development are linked to one another in a way that has not previously been envisioned in the research literature. To examine children’s learning of letter names, and to determine whether it is affected by the same variables that influence vocabulary learning, we asked preschoolers in the United States and Brazil to identify each letter of the alphabet by name. We examined their correct responses and the nature of their errors. Uppercase letters were used because these are typically learned before lowercase letters (Worden & Boettcher, 1990). We tested a large number of children (318 in the United States, 369 in Brazil) to ensure sufficient power to detect effects. The crosslanguage comparison is useful because, although both English and Portuguese use the letters of the Latin alphabet, the languages differ in some important ways that were expected to be relevant to letter name learning. Table 1 shows one difference: the names that are given to the letters. The US and Brazilian names are similar in some cases but not others. For example, the name of Q rhymes with that of B in Portuguese but not in English. The languages also differ in the relative frequencies of the letters. For example, T is more common than A in English words, but the reverse is true in Portuguese. If children who speak different languages perform differently on the same letters, then the factors by which those letters differ in those languages are promising candidates for explaining children’s performance. Researchers have documented some differences across languages and writing systems in the development of reading skills (e.g., Seymour, Aro, & Erskine, 2003), but we know of no direct cross-language comparisons of letter name learning. Our hypothesis that children learn the names of letters in much the same way that they learn the nouns that label other concrete objects suggests that we should look to the literature on vocabulary development for suggestions about the factors that may be involved in letter name learning. This literature shows that shape plays an important role in word learning. Objects that are similar in shape often belong to the same category and are called the same name. Indeed, many of the count nouns in young children’s vocabularies refer to classes of objects that are similar in shape (e.g., Gershkoff-Stowe & Smith, 2004). Children’s reliance on shape is revealed in their generalizations about the names of objects. For example, one toddler said moon when playing with a half-moon shaped lemon slice and when touching a circular chrome dial on a dishwasher, having previously used this word when looking at the moon (Bowerman, 1978). Similar sorts of extensions occur with lowercase letters. For example, children may use the name of b for the similarly shaped d or the name of p for q (e.g., Courrieu & De Falco, 1989; Popp, 1964). Treiman and Kessler (2003), in regression analyses carried out over the 26 letters of the English alphabet, found that children made more naming errors on Applied Psycholinguistics 27:2 213 Treiman et al.: Letter name learning Table 1. Letter names in Brazilian Portuguese and