"Letter Features as Predictors of Letter-Name Acquisition in Four Languages with Three Scripts"

​Professor Young-Suk Grace Kim (pictured right) is lead author of an article in Scientific Studies of Reading exploring children’s letter-name knowledge. The title of the article is “Letter Features as Predictors of Letter-Name Acquisition in Four Languages with Three Scripts.”

Co-authors are Yaacov Petscher (Florida State University), Rebecca Treiman (Washington University in St. Louis), and Benjamin Kelcey (University of Cincinnati).
 
Kim is Professor and Senior Associate Dean in the UCI School of Education. Her research foci include language, cognition, reading, writing, development, bilingual and biliteracy acquisition, dual language learners, and English learners. As director of UCI's Language, Literacy, and Learning (L3) Lab, she is particularly interested in examining how various factors co-develop and interact each other.

​Watch Kim discuss her research with Dean Richard Arum here (21:00)
 
Abstract

​To expand our understanding of script-general and script-specific principles in the learning of letter names, we examined how three characteristics of alphabet letters – their frequency in printed materials, order in the alphabet, and visual similarity to other letters – relate to children’s letter-name knowledge in four languages with three distinct scripts (English [N = 318; M age = 4.90], Portuguese [N = 366; M age = 5.80], Korean [N = 168; M age = 5.48], and Hebrew [N = 645; M age = 5.42]). Explanatory item response modeling analysis showed that the frequency of letters in printed materials was consistently related to letter difficulty across the four languages. There were also moderation effects for letter difficulty in English and Korean, and for discriminatory power of letters in Korean. The results suggest that exposure to letters as measured by letter frequency is a language-general mechanism in the learning of alphabet letters.