Young children's acquisition of alphabet knowledge

Abstract

This study documented children's acquisition of the following critical aspects of alphabet knowledge: letter recitation, naming, printing, and association of letters with sounds and words. These skills were tested for the entire set of upper- and lowercase letters in 188 children whose ages ranged from 2 1/2 to 7 1/2 years. Performance improved with age, at different rates for the different tasks, and the tasks were all highly correlated with one another. The children performed better on upper- than lowercase letters, and there were no sex differences in alphabet acquisition. Rank order correlations showed the degree to which letter difficulty was consistent across the age groups and across the various alphabet tasks. © 1990, SAGE Publications. All rights reserved.