Early readers know letter shape without knowing letter names

Since learning to read involves associating letter shapes with how they sound, it is widely believed that children become familiar with letter shapes when they start learning their sounds or start writing them down. However, since printed letters are often available in the environment, it is possible that children are already familiar with letter shapes. Here, we provide evidence for this intriguing possibility. We tested 300 children at the beginning of formal reading instruction of the Indian language Kannada. Each child performed four tasks: (1) a letter familiarity task in which they saw upright and inverted versions of each letter, and had to identify the more familiar orientation; (2) a letter recognition task where they had to name letters shown sequentially; (3) a visual search task where they had to find an oddball letter among identical other letters, with letters either all upright or inverted; and (4) a rapid automatized naming task where they had to name digits. Our main finding is that, despite showing wide variation in letter naming, children were highly familiar with letter orientation. This effect was present even on letters that children did not recognize at all. This familiarity with letter orientation also gave them a letter processing advantage: children searched faster when letters were upright than when they were inverted. Our findings reveal a far deeper knowledge of print among early readers than previously observed, and provide empirical support for early exposure to print as a strategy to jump-start reading acquisition.